Jill, being Jill, had hugged her. And told her that she’d have all the kids she wanted. She just had to put the thought out to the universe...
“I have no idea what came over me,” she said now. “I...didn’t even cry at her funeral.” She stared at Julie as though the other woman would have some explanation for Chantel’s bizarre behavior the night before.
She’d cried herself to sleep in Julie’s arms. The memory was embarrassing beyond words.
Disheartening.
Frightening.
And...nice. Which made not one whit of sense to her.
She had to move past it—accept that it happened, learn from it and make certain it never happened again.
“I just... I’m glad it was me you picked to share your grief with,” Julie said and left the room before Chantel could figure out what to do with that.
* * *
COLIN WAS IN meetings when he got the text from Chantel.
I swear to God I had nothing to drink, and I don’t even take aspirin or acetaminophen for headaches. No clue why I fell apart on your sister last night. I hope I didn’t do any damage. She seems fine. Please advise.
Probably one of the oddest texts he’d ever received.
The one from Julie came in while he was reading Chantel’s.
She’s up and at the table. I just left her to get breakfast from the oven. I made my quiche. Ha! Be jealous, you know you love it! She’s uncomfortable, but seems much better this morning. You made a good choice, bro. I approve!
Bro? She hadn’t called him that since she was about...fifteen. Which had been the year their mother died.
Excusing himself from the table, he stepped out into the hall and answered Julie first.
Thanks, Jules. You’re the best. And save some quiche for me. Love you.
Chantel was a bit more difficult.
After several tries, he ended up with, You’re fine. Welcome to the family. Even if it’s only temporary. Next time you sleep in my bed, I expect to be in it. Please advise.
He waited a couple of long minutes.
And didn’t receive a response back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I FEEL GUILTY, being spoiled like this,” Chantel said as Julie put a plate of quiche and a bowl of fresh fruit on the table in front of her. “I would have been happy to help.”
“So would our housekeeper,” Julie said. “Her name’s Louisa, by the way. I’m sure you’ll be meeting her soon. Anyway, I thought it was important that she was home to fix breakfast for her kids and see them off to school before coming here, so I do breakfast and she has dinner ready before she leaves. We fend for ourselves if either of us is here for lunch.”
“I still could have helped.” Chantel made a mean pancake. She liked them with chocolate ice cream on top instead of syrup, but she could adapt.
“I love to cook,” Julie told her. “So did my mom. She cooked most of our meals when I was growing up, much to Daddy’s chagrin. I look forward to my mornings in the kitchen.” She grinned as she took her seat.
And Chantel wished for about the millionth time that she’d met Julie on the street or in school. Anyplace where they could have been real friends.
The woman had spunk. And a spirit that, while damaged, was stronger than just about any she’d ever encountered, including her own. And Jill’s.
In another life, Julie would have made a great cop.
“Last night, you said you had something to talk to me about,” Julie said, as though she’d read Chantel’s mind.
She and Jill used to do that. Know what the other was thinking.
This was getting weird.
Then she remembered where she’d been heading when she’d derailed the night before.
“I know how it feels to have someone get away with a horrible crime,” she said, taking a bite of delicious broccoli quiche minus her usual appetite.
Surely that wasn’t going to change, too, the random thought popped up. She liked eating. It brought her pleasure.
And...back to topic. Jill’s killer had died before he could be brought to justice. That bugged Chantel. He’d made her suffer. He should have had to suffer, too.
“You do, too,” she said, testing Julie’s waters.
Julie nodded, without looking broken.
“So...as I was working on the script for the library event, something occurred to me and I can’t let go of it. You said David Smyth was going to be there.”
“With his wife, yes.”
“He’s married?”
“For six years,” Julie said. “They have a couple of kids now. A boy and a girl.”
A little girl. Whose father was a rapist. A memory flashed before her eyes. The touch of a hand against her breast. Groping. Stealing away all innocence. And faith in her mother, too. How could a woman trust anyone to look after her if her own stepfather could do such a thing?
Did Smyth’s wife know? Was he rough with her, too? The questions rose up in a black cloud before her mind’s eye.
Julie’s fork had stilled.
Chantel was going to have to tread carefully here. “We have to stop him.”
She saw Julie’s hand start to shake, heard the clatter as the utensil fell to her plate.
He’s still hurting people. He has more victims. She couldn’t tell Julie any of that. Johnson had no way of knowing it.
“I know you can’t say anything, Julie. I’m not asking you to be directly involved.” Not yet, anyway. Not unless a prosecutor needed her testimony. But that was a bridge she might never have to cross.
Julie wrapped her arms around her shoulders; she seemed to be shrinking in on herself.
Then Chantel was a kid again. Telling Jill that her mother had just blamed her for what her stepfather had done. Begging her friend to let her spend the night at her house. She couldn’t go back home to face those two.
“You have to take your power back,” she said aloud. Exactly what Jill had said to her that night.
Chantel had stayed not only that night with Jill, but several after that, as well. Defying her parents and even the truant officer—a fake, she later found out—who came looking for her, she’d hidden in Jill’s bedroom until that day her mother had visited Jill’s mother, begging to see Chantel. Her mother had known where she was all along, which was why she’d never reported her missing or had the police looking for her.
That day, her mother had shown her the divorce papers she’d filed and begged her forgiveness. The ex was giving her everything—walking away with nothing—as long as no charges were filed. He still denied the whole thing.
Chantel had done what her mother asked. She’d settled with “everything” and had gone home.
“How do I do that?” Julie’s pleading words broke Chantel away from the painful memories. “He took my power. And then, by signing that agreement, I gave him the rest of it.”
Now wasn’t the time to tell Julie that no legal agreement that took away a victim’s rights to defend herself in a court of law would be binding in court. Colin would know that. It could only keep them from speaking to anyone other than an attorney, the court or other legal officer pursuant to the case.
It was Colin and Julie who’d given up on pressing charges. They still had that right. They just didn’t have any evidence, any grounds against which they could file charges. Any hope of getting past a grand jury, let alone to court.
Colin would be well aware of all of that, too.
“I want to try to trap him into getting caught.” Chantel knew a second of real fear when she heard herself say the words out loud. “I’m confident I can do it. But I’d need some help. And the most important part is, no one can know, including your brother. If you think you can’t do it, or can’t do it without telling him, I need you to
be honest with me and I’ll let the whole thing drop.”
She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. But she also wasn’t going to have Julie blowing her out of the water before she’d had her chance. She wasn’t going to let Julie shoot herself in the foot again.
But there was the minor problem of needing help...
Shaking her head, Julie said, “I don’t understand.”
Of course not. How could she? “I’ve said as much as I’m going to until I know whether or not you can keep this to yourself. I don’t want to come between you and Colin—ever. And if your loyalty needs to be with him, I understand.”
“What about your loyalty? He really cares about you, and I thought...”
Whoa. This whole conversation had just taken a very wrong turn. “I do care about him!” Chantel said, infusing more truth than she wanted to know existed into the response. “More than I’ve ever...cared about...any man before in my life.” The absolute truth.
More than she cared about Max.
She couldn’t go there right then.
“But sometimes a woman just has to do things for herself,” she said now, words coming to her that were completely unplanned. She tried to get back on track. “You know your brother, Julie. He’s a protector. A doer. Like you said last night, he’s made his whole life about keeping you safe.”
“And now you, too.”
“I think it’s too early yet for that, but you seem pretty certain.” Which was good; it would work in her favor.
And could it be true? Was she more than just a passing fling for him, in spite of the fact that she’d told him she’d be gone soon?
For a split second her heart soared.
“If Colin knew I was planning anything that involves David Smyth, he’d do everything he could to stop me,” she said now.
She had to know if she had Julie’s trust. For her. And then to get her to let her help with Leslie, too. Julie had admitted the night before that she knew Leslie had been hurt. A little bit more, and she’d have Julie telling her who’d hurt Leslie. If she could help Julie believe that something good could come of breaking her friend’s trust.
“He says that the only thing we can count on is that money can buy anything,” Julie said softly. “The Smyths have more of it than we do.”
“My plan...if it fails, will mean no one is the wiser. They won’t even know we tried. If I succeed, we’ll have him dead to rights in front of everyone. I just need a chance to try, and I’ll need a little help behind the scenes to make it happen.”
It was a damned good plan.
“I’d love a chance to show you—and show me, too—that money and brute force don’t always win. That sometimes right wins. That there is justice. And that even though we’re women, we can be as powerful as anyone else.”
Another Jill throwback, one they’d based their lives on.
Until Jill had gone overboard and thought she could take care of everyone else, too.
Growing cold, Chantel sat there. Was she Jill? Thinking she had all the power and could save everyone?
Jill had tackled a known drug perp who’d been holding a loaded gun.
Was Chantel’s plan as reckless?
No. And Jill hadn’t been reckless. She’d saved her partner’s life. It was the oath they’d taken—to protect at all cost.
And Chantel would do the same.
“What’s your plan?”
Once again Julie’s words saved her from the craziness—the unwanted memories—that were invading her brain.
“What about Colin?”
“I won’t tell him. I’m not agreeing to help, either, but I won’t tell him.”
“You’re sure? If you don’t feel good about that, let me know. It’s fine. I just... I need this chance, Julie, and I wanted to offer it to you, too, but don’t take it if...”
“It won’t be the first secret I’ve kept from my brother, Chantel.” Julie’s words held a hint of the dry humor Chantel had glimpsed in her a time or two. Chantel wanted to meet Julie’s former self, the one Colin hinted at. She nodded.
“What Smyth did to you. It probably wasn’t the only time...”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about that.”
She had the go-ahead. But she held back.
“The thing is...until I do this, there’s not going to be any chance for me to pursue anything with Colin,” she said, when she’d meant to begin laying out the plan. “I...can’t believe how much he’s come to mean to me in such a short time, but I’m not...ready...for a relationship. Not like what seems to be happening between us. Last night made that pretty clear.”
She wanted to be talking Johnson rhetoric. And was afraid that she was not.
But she couldn’t let any of it stop her.
“I understand.” Julie actually smiled. “He can be a bit overpowering. But he’s really a big pushover, once you know how to handle him.”
“You feel strong when you’re with him, don’t you?”
Julie’s nod was slow but sure. “I always have. He brings out the best in me.”
And in her, too?
Was she going to lose the best thing she’d ever had—the best thing she ever would have—before she’d even had it for real?
“But I have to feel strong in myself. To have the kind of courage you do—enough to move across the country all on my own, because it’s the right thing for me. Or to be able to attend a fundraiser, regardless of who’s present, because I care about the cause. Without having a panic attack.” She wasn’t grinning now.
And so, without further soul-searching, Chantel told Julie about her plan to rewrite the script.
“The new rewrite already has the hostess, me, being a flirt and the host, Colin, being overly interested in money. Leslie had said she wanted things beefed up with more suspicion, and that seemed the obvious venue to take.”
At least it must have to whomever Wayne had retained to rewrite the script.
“I plan to make a private aside or two to David Smyth early on. Enough to get him going. What I plan to add, is to have me be murdered during the evening—a surprise thing. I’ll have it done in that small room upstairs that’s being turned into a reserved studying room. Everyone will come up to look at the body and look for clues. I’ll be lying there, dead. After we know that junior has seen me, a call will go out, gathering everyone downstairs in the main room for a big announcement. The dead bodies will remain in place, as already planned, but everyone else, including Colin, will be in the drawing room. The big announcement won’t even be known to Colin. Someone will have to read it.”
She’d been thinking Leslie would be good for that part.
“Before the announcement is read, all the lights in the library will go out. No one will know if that’s for real or not. They’ll come back on in a moment or two. My hope is that junior will take that opportunity to sneak out of the room and head back upstairs to where I’m still lying there dead. If he gets caught, he’s just looking for clues.” She was profiling. Deliberately taunting the rapist with a temptation that should be hard for him to resist. Counting on him to take her bait. She’d seen it happen enough to know the ploy worked more often than most would expect.
“I’ll have a camera set up in the room. He comes in. Comes on to me. I tell him to get lost. He gets mad and tries to force me. Then we’ve got him on film. I scream. Everyone rushes upstairs to see what’s going on. He gets caught,” she hastened to add. “I’ll scream before it gets any further than that.”
Julie wasn’t shaking her head. “What do you plan to do with the video?”
Julie would never believe they could go to the police with it.
“Play it right there, if I have to. I’m hoping the mob will lynch him as soon as they see what he was trying to do. At the very least, his wife will see him
for what he is.”
“And Colin?” The look on Julie’s face was more shrewd than Chantel would have liked.
“What about him?”
“You expect him just to sit back and be content with a lynch mob when he sees the man who raped his sister going after his girlfriend?”
His girlfriend. She sat there, nonplussed. How had she expected Colin would react?
“You’re forcing him to take action,” Julie said, and Chantel couldn’t tell what his sister thought of that. “You’re doing this to help him, too. And that’s why you don’t want him to know what’s going on. Not just because you know there’s no way he’d ever agree to it, but because you want him to have the chance—in his own eyes—to make this right. You know he won’t refuse to go after David to the fullest extent of the law.”
Maybe Johnson could have had the thought a time or two if she’d let herself bring Colin into the mix.
So was Julie going to refuse to help her, after all? Because she’d seen something Chantel hadn’t been willing to look at? The fact that she was playing God, manipulating Colin into coming to terms with the past so the he could be free to embrace the future.
Or at least trust himself a little more. And not be so damned obsessive about protecting the world all by his testosterone-driven self.
“You don’t have to help me,” she reminded Julie, who’d picked up her fork and begun eating again.
Knowing that it would be a sin to let such great food go to waste, Chantel joined her.
“I want to help you more now than ever,” Julie said over her second bite. “I’d give just about anything to be able to undo the choice Colin and I made ten years ago. Sometimes I think signing away our rights has hurt us more than the rape did.”
It was going to work. She was going to be able to make this work!
“Obviously, I can be in charge of the lights going out,” Julie said. “If David doesn’t leave the first time, I turn them out again. The new breaker box is on the wall just outside the windows in the main room. It’s not like anyone would think it strange if odd little agoraphobic Julie slips away...”
Love by Association Page 21