Phillip opened it and stared in surprise at the huge figure that he read. “What is this?”
“It’s an offer for Payton Enterprises. I trust you’ll find it fair.”
“I don’t,” said Phillip. He stared into the old man’s face. “The business isn’t worth half that now, and you know it.”
“Then take it as an apology as well.”
Shae’s voice flared with anger. “So you’re going to try to buy off Phillip, is that it? Half of Ethan’s problem is he’s never learned to take no for an answer. How will buying Payton Enterprises for him teach your son a lesson? How will buying silence prevent him from killing Phillip, out of spite? Or from attacking me?”
“It wouldn’t. But I’m not buying it for Ethan, because he’s no longer my heir.”
Both Phillip and Shae gaped in stunned silence at the news.
Augustus Lowell nodded grimly. “No Lowell behaves as Ethan has. I’ll set up a trust fund, which will provide him a generous stipend as long as he conforms to certain conditions. First, he must immediately leave Port Providence and never set foot again in Texas. Second, he must legally change his family name; I won’t have him bearing mine. And last, the two of you must remain in perfect health. Any mysterious misfortunes will return the remaining monies to the bulk of my estate, which will, after my wife and I are gone, be used to fund a charitable foundation. Do you find that satisfactory?”
Shae nodded, apparently struck speechless by his words.
Phillip, however, shook his head. “I don’t, sir. I swore an oath, and I stand by it. Your offer is very generous, but I can’t accept this.”
Shae stared at him, and he hated the disappointment in her eyes.
“Are you certain?” Lowell asked.
“Absolutely,” Phillip told him.
Both men stood, and the two shook hands.
“You always were a man of honor,” Augustus Lowell said. “I wonder that your father never saw it. But men, at times, are blind to their own sons. Just remember that this offer stands, should you ever change your mind. God be with you both.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“So you’re still here,” Dr. Tuttle commented as Justine nibbled a last bit of cornbread.
She nodded tiredly. “For the moment. But my rest this afternoon seems long ago.”
He sat in the chair beside her and covered a yawn with one long-fingered hand. “I think the worst is over. You could go home now.”
“And you?”
He shrugged. “No one to go home to, so I’ll stay around until the morning. How about you? Will you come back?”
“I really hadn’t thought much of it. Maybe after things are settled, I’d be in the way.”
He shook his head and smiled warmly. “You’re your brother’s sister, Justine. As long as I have any say in it, you’ll be welcome here. You’d be welcome anywhere I go.”She couldn’t help but smile, even though she dropped her gaze. “Do you think do you think someone like me could study nursing?”
“When you say ‘someone like me,’ do you mean ‘someone thoughtful’, ‘someone caring’, or ‘someone beautiful’?” he asked. “All of those apply, and none, as far as I know, would keep anyone from acceptance in a school for nurses.”
This time she did look up at him, to see if he was mocking. But all she saw was kindness, along with a hint of something warmer, something that she’d never seen before, yet recognized at once.
Her face warmed, and she was embarrassed to realize she must be blushing. Taking up her cane, she said, “Please excuse me. I I need to see if there’s still coffee.”
As she hobbled toward the room with the remaining food, she could barely suppress a smile. Unlike most people, Hiram Tuttle didn’t see her as a misshapen foot. He didn’t
She nearly stumbled with a sudden realization. Sal Madsen, the man who was searching for his missing brother, hadn’t at first mentioned his brother’s missing leg. Instead, when he’d initially described him, he had told her, His name’s Gabe. He’s got dark hair, a lot like mine.
But not a deformity. Unlike nearly anyone else, who would first describe the absence of the limb, this Madsen didn’t mention it until later, after Justine hesitated. Had he added that detail merely to gain her confidence, her pity?
Her earlier suspicions came flooding back. Was Madsen really a dock worker out to harm her brother? She cringed at the memory of how she’d told the man it wouldn’t hurt for him to look around himself.
She nearly cried out at her sudden jolt of fear, then turned to hurry toward the room where Phillip rested. How could she have been so foolish? How could she have allowed herself to fall for a story contrived to fool a crippled girl?
As she reached the office wing, she hesitated. Madsen was a powerfully built man. What if she were to come upon him by herself? She trembled and wondered if Phillip couldn’t take care of this problem on his own. Or perhaps she could get Tuttle, though she’d feel ridiculous if she were wrong.
She shook her head, sickened by her cowardice. If Madsen had come here, he might well be armed. She couldn’t count on Phillip realizing the man was out to harm him in time to fend off an attack.
She had to hurry and warn her brother, she realized. She had to stop Sal Madsen before it was too late.
*
After Lowell left, Phillip turned toward Shae. “You think that I’m a fool.”
“First a failure, then a fool. Why don’t you ask me my own thoughts instead of telling? I’d never be as hard on you as you are on yourself,” she said.
“Tell me then. What do you think?”
She was quiet for a time as she attempted to frame her thoughts with words. “I think that we both suffer from obsessions, mine to learn what happened to my mother . . . yours to be the perfect martyr to your father’s selfishness. How can we have a future when we’re both so caught up in the past?”
“What in God’s name are you saying?”
“That house collapse did nothing to resolve this. I’m still saying the same thing I said before. There’s nothing I can do to make you happy, not unless you’re happy with yourself. And I love you far too much to sit by helplessly and watch you suffer.”
“Shae, no. I can’t lose you now. I won’t.”
She shook her head. “I’m not trying to coerce you. I’m just trying to say that neither of us is ready for a marriage that can’t work.”
“You’re wrong. Can’t you see we need each other now more than ever? I can help you face your father. I can help”
She interrupted with a shake of red-gold tresses. “ The house is ruined. Father’s dead. Aunt Alberta says I killed him, since he drowned looking for me. Now all I have to face are ghosts and questions that never can be answered. I’m not certain I can be the sort of wife that you deserve. Not when I don’t know the truth yet. Not when I’ll never”
“ Oh, Shae, I’m so sorry. But you know it wasn’t your fault. Your father shot you. Was your aunt merely expecting you to go up to your room and stand in a corner, like a naughty child?”
He reached for her, but she stepped backward, her attention riveted by an echo of her aunt’s cruel words. I wished you’d drowned instead. I wish that you were dead just like your mother.
Shae’s hands flew to the necklace at her throat. “My God, she knew!”
“What’s wrong?”
She stared up at Phillip. “My aunt knew he’d killed her all along!”
“How do you know? What did she say?”
A knock interrupted their conversation. A deep voice bored through the door. “Dr. Payton, you’re needed right away!”
He hesitated, staring at Shae. “Tell me.”
She shook her head. “Someone needs your help. I’ll take care of this.”
“Not without me,” he insisted. “Wait for me. Shae, I love you. Together we’ll be so much stronger than we are apart. Please trust me in this. Please, promise me you’ll wait.”
She felt her stiffness so
ften slightly as his fingers brushed her cheek. He kissed her but pulled back all too soon.
“I’ll be back as quickly as possible.”
She nodded. Then he left her, and she wondered how soon would be soon enough.
*
“This way, Dr. Payton.”
Phillip barely recognized the man’s face as he turned. Instead, he wondered if another wounded survivor had been found among the wreckage. He took two steps toward the examination area when a hand clapped on his shoulder and pulled him off-stride. It took a second more to realize the cool metal thrust against his neck must be the muzzle of a pistol.
“Make a move and it’ll be your last one.” There was hardness in the man’s voice that guaranteed his threat.
Phillip froze. God damn it. How could this happen now? Now, when Shae had returned alive, now, when he still had so much to tell her.
“I hope that Ethan paid you in advance.” With an effort, Phillip kept his voice steady and assured, though he almost imagined that Shae, inside Tuttle’s office, could hear the pounding of his heart.
“Don’t you worry none about me. Your only part in this is followin’ directions, Nigger-lover. Now turn around. We’re goin’ back down this hall. An’ if we see anybody, I want you to think about your buddy, Lowell. You really want him to get two killin’s for the price of one?”
“If it’s money that you’re after, I can top his offer,” Phillip told him. The longer he could keep the man talking, the longer he could stay alive. “Especially now that Ethan’s father’s cut off his funds.”
Something hard struck the back of Phillip’s head. He staggered and would have fallen, except the dark-haired man grabbed his upper arm.
“I’m sick a you already, Payton. Stop worryin’ so much about money. Way I feel about you, I’d do the job for free. Now move.” The voice remained soft and controlled.
Dizziness and nausea buckled Phillip’s knees. Before, he might have fought the man, but now it was all he could manage to stay on his feet. The thought darted through his mind that he might still call for help, but Shae would likely hear him and be hurt or killed as well. Even if it meant his death, he could not risk her safety.
Leaning against the man who meant to kill him, Phillip managed a slow shuffle down the hall.
*
Shae stood with the cameo clutched in her uninjured left hand. Father had crafted this piece, like all the others Glennis once had worn. And now, irrevocably, both of them were gone. Now, despite her lingering questions, she could extinguish the tiny flame of hope that she’d kept burning for her mother. Now her grieving could begin in earnest.
But what about for King? How could she begin to sort out the way she felt about his death? He had killed her mother, yet even so, Alberta’s news, her accusation felt like a pair of millstones tied around her soul.
Alberta said he’d drowned.
Alberta, who clearly knew Glennis was dead and never missing. . .
Shae thought of all the myriad examples of Alberta excusing Father’s temper. When she could, her aunt had tried to mislead her into believing that, somehow, whatever happened had been an accident. When those lies would no longer suffice, she switched to other tactics, such as her favorite, blaming Shae. Even when Alberta herself became upset with her brother, she always, always defended him.
Apparently, she hadn’t even drawn the line at murder.
Shae felt sick to think of her father’s and aunt’s grisly conspiracy. However had they managed to keep the truth from her? Why was it, until recently, she had let herself be fooled?
A remembered glimpse of Glennis threatened Shae’s full stomach with upheaval. Glennis, behind the screen of oleanders. Glennis, with that strange man in her arms. The promise she had made to Mother, the oath that she would never tell.
Shae had kept that oath, though it had cost her. In the end, it cost even her ability to believe her mother never would have left her. Though the Rowans’ cruelty or her own weakness may have driven her to become a faithless wife, Glennis had been a good mother.
Yet, because of her presumed desertion, Shae had sometimes truly hated her. Hated her and paid, by proxy, for the woman’s failings.
She tried to imagine herself quitting, giving up her quest to learn what had really happened. With Mother, King, even Lucius dead, how could the truth make any difference?
Shae’s mouth was dry, and the food had formed a greasy lump inside her stomach. Did she really want to know the details of her mother’s murder? She imagined Father finding Glennis with another, then clenching his huge hands around her throat. Or had he shot her with the very gun he’d used to wound Shae six years later? A dozen grisly scenarios sprang to her mind, each more lurid than the next, and she knew they’d never stop until she knew for certain.
Dear God, how could she let go of her questions? Not when someone lived who knew the truth, yet hid it. She had to confront her aunt to find out what the woman knew and when she’d known it. Alberta was her last link to her mother’s final moments . . . if Shae could bear to hear what really happened.
Alberta. Closing her eyes, Shae tried to block out the last images of the old woman’s anger. Anger and perhaps something more as well.
Is it really you, then? Shae remembered the fear in Alberta’s voice, and her own conviction that her aunt at first mistook her for her mother, even though Alberta knew Glennis was dead. Had King’s death and the hurricane unhinged her? Or was guilt that she’d said nothing finally gnawing at the old woman’s sanity.
Just the way her own imagination gnawed at Shae’s.
If she and Phillip were ever to resolve their problems, he deserved a whole, unbroken woman as his wife. There was only one way that she knew to piece together all the shards of who she was.
She must lay the past to rest before she could attend the future. She must confront Alberta on her own.
*
“I said on your knees!”
The strength was flowing back to Phillip, but not fast enough. When his attacker shoved him roughly, he dropped suddenly. His kneecaps, slamming onto tile, radiated agony up to his hips.
He wondered grimly whose empty office it was that this man meant to splatter with his brain. When Phillip looked up into the man’s face, silhouetted by the wall lantern in the hall behind him, he saw no features, just the dim shape of a killer.
“I want you to see me,” the man said, turning. “I reckon you don’t even remember who I am.”
Phillip stared at him until he recognized the fighter’s build, the red-bronze, hardened features.
“I remember you,” he said. “Sal Madsen. You’re the first man I dismissed. You threatened a man I’d hired with a six-inch blade.”
“You’ll be glad to hear I quit the knives. I’ve switched to guns these days. And that weren’t no man I said I’d carve up. It was just some nigger out to steal a white man’s job.”
“You had a good job.”
“Until you took it. Now I reckon I’ll take somethin’ a sight more valuable from you.” He cocked the Colt and leveled it at Phillip’s forehead. Yet he hesitated, then grinned, clearly relishing his moment of revenge. “You wanta beg now, I might listen.”
This was it then, Phillip realized. His whole life was about to be summed up in an expanding puddle of brains and blood and bone. From his knees, these last two years seemed a profound waste, a foolish monument to his own stubbornness and pride. Why couldn’t he have told Shae she was right? Why couldn’t he admit that bowing to his father’s blackmail had been a miserable mistake?
I’m sorry, Shae, he thought, and he despaired with the knowledge of how she would have filled the emptiness inside him with color and with light.
His head drooped in preparation for what he knew must come next. Until he heard the creek of the door hinge.
Behind him, the door swung further open, and Phillip caught sight of Justine raising her cane high above her. Oh, God, no! he thought. Please don’t let her see this! Don’t l
et him hurt her too!
Madsen must have seen the horror in his eyes, for he whirled, lifting the gun to fire at the intruder.
Phillip launched himself at Madsen’s legs at the same instant Justine’s cane crashed against his head. Somehow, the dockworker squeezed off a shot as he fell, and Phillip heard a heavy thud out in the hall.
“Justine!” he shouted. Rolling Madsen over, he straddled the man’s chest and hammered at his face. Bone crunched and blood spurted from Sal’s collapsing teeth and nose. Still, Phillip continued pounding long past the point of subduing his attacker. Though the repeated impact split his knuckles, he wanted nothing more than to beat the man to death.
“Stop it, Phillip! Stop!”
Justine’s cries registered at last, and sanity began to filter through his brain. She was sitting on the hallway floor, reaching for her cane.
Two doctors raced toward them down the hall. One was Hiram Tuttle.
“Are you hurt, Justine?” Phillip climbed off of the unconscious man and kicked away the Colt revolver.
“I hit him! I was so afraid, but I hit him anyway.” She smiled through her tears, smiled, in spite of the bleeding man still in the doorway. Crawling on her knees, she threw herself into her brother’s arms and squeezed him tightly.
“He didn’t hit you, did he?” Phillip asked.
He felt her head shake in answer. “I lost my balance when I struck him with my cane. Oh, Phillip . . . I was so frightened. I thought he’d kill you before I could catch up.”
Phillip handed her the cane and helped her up just as the others reached them. Both doctors shouted questions, which they steadfastly ignored.
In a moment, their attention turned to the man lying on the floor.
“He’s still breathing!” Tuttle said.
The second man, Donald Graham, knelt beside Hiram and Madsen and peered into the latter’s ruined face.
“What in God’s name have you done here?” he asked Phillip. “He’ll need months of care!”
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