by Nora Roberts
“Don’t touch me!”
“All right.” Instinctively, Kirby lowered her voice, gentled it. “Why don’t you come up to the house? You’ve hurt yourself. Your hands are bleeding.”
“I . . .” Confused, Jo looked down, saw the scrapes and the slow trickle of blood on the heels of her hands. “I fell.”
“I know. I saw you. Come on up. I’ll clean them for you.”
“I don’t need—they’re all right.” She couldn’t even feel her hands. Then her legs began to tremble, her head began to spin. “He killed my mother. Kirby, he murdered my mother. She’s dead.”
Cautiously, Kirby moved closer until she could slide a supporting hand around Jo’s waist. “Come with me. Come home with me now.” When Jo sagged, she led her across the sand. Glancing back, she saw Nathan standing a few yards away. In the moonlight their eyes met briefly. Then he turned and walked away into the dark.
“I feel sick,” Jo murmured. Sensation was creeping back, tiny needle pricks all over her skin, and with it the greasy churning in her stomach.
“It’s all right. You need to lie down. Lean on me and we’ll get you inside.”
“He killed her. Nathan knew. He told me.” It felt as if she were floating now, up the steps, in the door of the cottage. “My mother’s dead.”
Saying nothing, Kirby helped Jo onto the bed, put a light blanket over her. She was beginning to tremble with shock now. “Slow breaths,” Kirby ordered. “Concentrate on breathing. I’m just going in the other room for a moment. I’m going to get something to help you.”
“I don’t need anything.” Fresh panic snaked through her, and she gripped Kirby’s hand hard. “No sedatives. I can get through this. I can. I have to.”
“Of course you can.” Kirby eased onto the bed and took Jo’s wrist to check her pulse. “Are you ready to tell me about it?”
“I have to tell someone. I can’t tell my family yet. I can’t face that yet. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to feel.”
The pulse rate was slowing, and Jo’s pupils were returning to normal. “What did Nathan say to you, Jo?”
Jo stared at the ceiling, focused on it, centered herself on it. “He told me that his father had murdered my mother.”
“Dear God.” Horrified, Kirby lifted Jo’s hand to her cheek. “How did it happen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I couldn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen. He said his father killed her, that he kept a journal. Nathan found it, and he came back here. I slept with him.” Tears trickled out of her eyes, slid away. “I slept with the son of my mother’s murderer.”
Calm was needed now, Kirby knew. And cool logic. The wrong word, the wrong tone, and she was afraid Jo would break in her hands. “Jo, you slept with Nathan. You cared for Nathan, and he for you.”
“He knew. He came back here knowing what his father had done.”
“And that must have been terribly hard for him.”
“How can you say that?” Furious, Jo pushed herself onto her elbows. “Hard for him?”
“And courageous,” Kirby said softly. “Jo, how old would he have been when your mother died?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Nine or ten, I imagine. Just a little boy. Are you going to blame the little boy?”
“No. No. But he’s not a little boy now, and his father—”
“Nathan’s father. Not Nathan.”
A sob choked out, then another. “He took her away from me.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.” Kirby gathered Jo close. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
As Jo wept in her arms, Kirby knew this storm was only the beginning.
IT took an hour before she could think again. She sipped the hot, sweet tea Kirby made her. The sick panic had flowed away in a wash of grief. Now, for a moment, the grief was almost as soothing as the tea.
“I knew she was dead. Part of me always knew, from the time it happened. I would dream of her. As I got older I pushed the dreams away, but they would always come back. And they only got stronger.”
“You loved her. Now, as horrible as things are, you know she didn’t leave you.”
“I can’t find comfort in that yet. I wanted to hurt Nathan. Physically, emotionally, in every possible way to cause him pain. And I did.”
“Do you think that’s an abnormal reaction? Jo, give yourself a break.”
“I’m trying to. I nearly cracked again. I would have if you hadn’t been there.”
“But I was.” Kirby squeezed Jo’s hand. “And you’re stronger than you think. Strong enough to get through this.”
“I have to be.” She drank more tea, then set the cup down. “I have to go back to Nathan’s.”
“You don’t have to do anything tonight but get some rest.”
“No, I never asked why or how or ...” She shut her eyes. “I have to have the answers. I don’t think I can live with this until I have the answers. When I go to my family, I have to know it all.”
“You could go to them now, I’ll go with you. You could ask the questions together.”
“I have to do it alone. I’m at the center of this, Kirby.” Jo’s head throbbed nastily. When she opened her eyes they were brutally dark in a colorless face. “I’m in love with the man whose father murdered my mother.”
WHEN Kirby dropped her off at Nathan’s cottage, Jo could see his silhouette through the screen door. She wondered if either of them would ever do a harder thing in their lives than facing the past and each other.
He said nothing as she climbed the steps, but opened the door, stepped back to let her in. He’d thought he would never see her again, and he wasn’t sure whether that would have been harder to live with, or if seeing her like this—pale and stricken—was worse.
“I need to ask you . . . I need to know.”
“I’ll tell you what I can.”
She rubbed her hands together so that the small pain of her scratched palms would keep her centered. “Did they—were they involved?”
“No.” He wanted to turn away but forced himself to face the pain in her eyes. “There was nothing like that between them. Even in the journal, he wrote that she was devoted to her family. To her children, her husband. Jo—”
“But he wanted there to be. He wanted her.” She opened her hands. “They fought? There was an accident.” Her breath shuddered, and the words were a plea. “It was an accident.”
“No. God.” It was worse, he thought, by every second that passed it grew worse. “He knew her habits. He studied them. She used to walk, at night, around the gardens.”
“She . . . she loved the flowers at night.” The dream she’d had the night they’d found Susan Peters spun back into her mind. “She loved the white ones especially. She loved the smells and the quiet. She called it her alone time.”
“He chose the night,” Nathan continued. “He put a sleeping pill into my mother’s wine so she ... so she wouldn’t know he’d been gone. Everything he did he documented step by step in his journal. He wrote that he waited for Annabelle at the edge of the forest to the west of the house.” It was killing him by degrees to say it, to look into Jo’s face and say it. “He knocked her unconscious and took her into the forest. He had everything set up. He’d already set up his lights, his tripod. It wasn’t an accident. It was planned. It was premeditated. It was deliberate.”
“But why?” She had to sit. On legs stiff and brittle as twigs, she stumbled to a chair. “I remember him. He was kind to me. And patient. Daddy took him fishing. And Mama would make him pecan pie now and then because he was fond of it.” She made a helpless sound, then pressed her fingers to her lips to hold it back. “Oh, God, you want me to believe he murdered her for no reason?”
“He had a purpose.” He did turn away now and strode into the kitchen to drag a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard. “You could never call it a reason.”
He splashed the liquor into a glass, tossed it back quickly, and hissed through th
e sting. With his palms braced on the counter, he waited for his blood to settle.
“I loved him, Jo. He taught me how to ride a bike, how to field a grounder. He paid attention. Whenever he traveled, he’d call home not just to talk to my mother but to all three of us. And he listened—not just the pretense of listening some adults think a child can’t see through. He cared.”
He turned back to her, his eyes eloquent. “He would bring my mother flowers for no reason. I’d lie in bed at night and listen to them laughing together. We were happy, and he was the center of it. Now I have to face that there was no center, that he was capable of something monstrous.”
“I feel carved out,” she managed. Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her shoulders. “Scraped out. Raw. All these years.” She squeezed her eyes tight a moment. “Your lives just went on?”
“He was the only one who knew, and he was very careful. Our lives just went on. Until his ended and I went through his personal papers and found the journal and photographs.”
“Photographs.” The floating sensation ended with a jerk. “Photographs of my mother. After she was dead.”
He had to say it all, no matter how even the thought ripped through his brain. “ ‘The decisive moment,’ he called it.”
“Oh, my God.” Lectures heard, lectures given, whirled in her head. Capturing the decisive moment, anticipating when the dynamics of a situation will reach peak, knowing when to click the shutter to preserve that most powerful image. “It was a study, an assignment.”
“It was his purpose. To manipulate, to cause, to control, and to capture death.” Nausea churned violently. He downed more Scotch, pitting the liquor against the nausea. “It wasn’t all, it can’t be. There was something warped inside him. Something we never saw. Something no one ever saw, or suspected. He had friends, a successful career. He liked to listen to ball games on TV and read mystery novels. He liked to barbecue, he wanted grandchildren.”
It was tearing him apart, every word, every memory. “There is no defense,” he said. “No absolution.”
She stepped forward. Every emotion inside her coalesced and focused on one point. “He took photographs of her. Of her face. Her eyes. Of her body. Nudes. He posed her, carefully. Her head tilted down toward her left shoulder, her right arm draped across her midriff.”
“How do you—”
“I did see.” She closed her eyes and spun away. Relief was cold, painfully cold. An icy layer over hot grief. “I’m not crazy. I was never crazy. I didn’t hallucinate. It was real. All of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Impatient, she dug her cigarettes out of her back pocket. But when she struck the match, she only stared down at the flame. “My hand’s steady,” she muttered. “It’s perfectly steady. I’m not going to break now. I can get through it. I’m never going to break again.”
Worried that he had pushed her over some line, he moved toward her. “Jo Ellen.”
“I’m not crazy.” Her head snapped up. Calmly she touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette. “I’m not going to shatter and fall ever again. The worst is just the next thing you have to find room for and live with.” She blew out smoke, watched it haze, then vanish. “Someone sent me a photograph of my mother. One of your father’s photographs.”
His blood chilled. “That’s impossible.”
“I saw it. I had it in my hands. It’s what snapped me, what I couldn’t find room for. Then.”
“You told me someone was sending you pictures of yourself.”
“They were. It was with them, in the last package I got in Charlotte. And afterward, when I was able to function a little, I couldn’t find it. Whoever sent it got into my apartment and took it back. I thought I was hallucinating. But it was real. It existed. It happened.”
“I’m the only one who could have sent it to you. I didn’t.”
“Where are the pictures? The negatives?”
“They’re gone.”
“Gone? How?”
“Kyle wanted to destroy them, them and the journal. I refused. I wanted time to decide what to do. We argued about it. His stand was that it had been twenty years. What good would it do to bring it all out? It could ruin both of us. He was furious that I would even consider going to the police, or to your family. The next morning he was gone. He’d taken the photographs and the journal with him. I didn’t know where to find him. The next I heard he’d drowned. I have to assume he couldn’t live with it. That he destroyed everything, then himself.”
“The photographs weren’t destroyed.” Her mind was very clear and cold. “They exist, just like the ones of me exist. I look like my mother. It’s not a large leap to shift an obsession with her to one with me.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that, that it hasn’t terrified me? When we found Susan Peters, and I realized how she’d died, I thought ... I’m the only one left, Jo. I buried my father.”
“But did you bury your brother?”
He stared, shook his head slowly. “Kyle’s dead.”
“How do you know? Because the reports say he got drunk and fell off a boat? And what if he didn’t, Nathan? He had the photographs, the negatives, the journal.”
“But he did drown. He was drunk, stumbling drunk, depressed, moody, according to the people who were with him on the yacht. They didn’t realize he was missing until well into the next morning. All of his clothes, his gear were still on the boat.”
When she said nothing, he spun around her and began to pace. “I have to accept what my father did, what he was. Now you want me to believe my brother’s alive, that he’s capable of all this. Of stalking you, pushing you until you collapse. Of following you here and . . .” As the rest slammed into him, he turned back. “Of killing Susan Peters.”
“My mother was strangled, wasn’t she, Nathan?”
“Yes. Christ.”
She had to stay cold, Jo warned herself, and go to the next step. “Susan Peters was raped.”
Understanding the question she was asking, Nathan closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“If it wasn’t her husband—”
“The police haven’t found any evidence to hold the husband. I checked before I came back. Jo Ellen.” It scraped his heart to tell her. “They’re going to be looking more closely into Ginny’s disappearance now.”
“Ginny?” With understanding came horror. The cold that had shielded her melted away in it. “Oh, no. Ginny.”
He couldn’t touch her, could offer her nothing. He left her alone, stepped out onto the porch. He put his hands on the rail and leaned out, desperate for air. When the screen door squeaked, he made himself straighten.
“What was your father’s purpose, Nathan? What were the photographs to accomplish if he would never be able to show them to anyone?”
“Perfection. Control. Not simply to observe, and preserve, but to be a part of the image. To create it. The perfect woman, the perfect crime, the perfect image. He thought she was beautiful, intelligent, gracious. She was worthy.”
He watched fireflies light up the dark in quick, flirtatious winks. “I should have told you, all of you, as soon as I came here. I told myself I wanted—needed—time to try to understand it. I justified keeping it to myself because you had all accepted a lie, and the truth was worse. Then I kept it to myself because I wanted you. It got easier to rationalize it. You’d been hurt, you were wounded. It could wait until you trusted me. It could wait until you were in love with me.”
His fingers flexed and released on the railing as she stood silent behind him. “Rationalizations are usually self-serving. Mine were. After Susan Peters, I couldn’t ignore the truth anymore, or your right to know it. There’s nothing I can do to change it, to atone for what he did. Nothing I can say can heal the damage he did to you and your family.”
“No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say. He took my mother, and left us all to think she had abandoned us. That single selfish act damaged all of our liv
es, left a rift in our family we’ve never been able to heal. He must have hurt her.” Jo’s voice quavered so she bit down hard on her lip until she could steady it. “She must have been so frightened, so confused. She’d done nothing to deserve it, nothing but be who she was.”
She drew a long breath, tasted the sea, and released it. “I wanted to blame you for it, Nathan, because you’re here. Because you had your mother all your life. Because you touched me and made me feel what I’d never felt before. I needed to blame you for it. So I did.”
“I expected you to.”
“You never had to tell me. You could have buried it, forgotten it. I never would have known.”
“I’d have known, and every day I’d have had with you would have been a betrayal.” He turned to her. “I wish I could have lived with that, spared you this and saved myself. But I couldn’t.”
“And what now?” Lifting her face to the sky, she searched her heart. “Am I to make you pay what can’t be paid, punish you for something that was done to both of us when we were children?”
“Why shouldn’t you?” Bitterness clogged his throat as he looked out into the trees, where the river flowed in secret silence. “How could you look at me and not see him, and what he did? And hate me for it.”
It was exactly what she had done, Jo thought. She had looked at him, seen his father, and hated. He had taken it, the verbal and physical blows, without a word in his own defense.
Courageous, Kirby had called him. And she’d been right.
How badly he’d been damaged, she realized. She wondered why it had taken her even this long to realize that however much harm had been done to her, an equal share had been done to him. “You don’t give me much credit for intelligence or compassion. Obviously you have a very low opinion of me.”
He hadn’t known he had the strength left to be surprised. He stared at her in disbelief. “I don’t understand you.”
“No, you certainly don’t if you think that after I’d had time to accept it, to grieve, I would blame you, or hold you accountable.”