“Vera, don’t touch anything.”
“But somebody… Somebody’s been…” Rage welled like an orchestral crescendo. “My house has been… My house. James, somebody tried to break into my house.”
“They succeeded,” he said, peering in one jagged, broken pane. “Look at the shatter pattern, Vera. There’s more glass out here than on the garage floor. The windows were broken from the inside.”
The window on the service door was shattered as well, and all the glass from that blow was on the sidewalk.
If Donal had been standing before her, Vera might well have raised her hand to him.
“James, let me go. I have to see.”
“You can’t touch anything,” he said, his grip not easing in the least. “Vera, you can’t go in there.”
She dreaded going inside, but she needed to. “It’s my damned house, and I’ll go in there if I want to.”
“It’s your house,” James said gently, “but, Vera, it’s a crime scene now. You could disturb evidence that will help the cops catch whoever did this to you.”
She wrenched free of his grasp but made no move to approach the house. “As if there’s any question who’s at fault?”
“There’s always question,” James said. “Donal is innocent until proven guilty, and we don’t know if whoever did this has left the scene.”
For the first time, Vera felt a sense of resentment when she looked at her lovely old stone house. She took a step away from the house, closer to James.
“I can’t bring Twyla home to this.” Twyla played in that garage sometimes, while Vera was absorbed with her damned Pischna.
“Let’s get back in the car,” James suggested. “We can call the sheriff and let Mac know what’s afoot. Hannah’s mom can probably stay with the girls, and we can sort the rest out later.”
Vera wanted to smack him, just whale on him, beat her fists on his muscular chest, backhand his handsome, grave face with a violence that frightened her more than Donal’s idiocy ever would. She also wanted James to hold her, and make her house the safe, welcoming place it was supposed to be.
She settled for being led back to the car and driven to the foot of the lane, while James called the sheriff’s office and calmly reported evidence of a break-in. His next call was to Hannah’s mother, Judge Louise Merriman, who was all too happy to spend some time with her granddaughters and their friend. The last call was to Mac, who promised to come over as soon as Louise posted at Trent and Hannah’s house.
“Don’t say anything to Twyla,” James admonished his brother. “We haven’t sorted out what to say to her yet, or where Vera and she will go from here.”
He put his phone away and draped a wrist over the steering wheel. “We don’t know it was Donal. Why would he antagonize you now, when he ought to be currying your favor?”
James was determined to be rational, to manage, to deal with the situation calmly. Vera both treasured and resented that about him, and would save for another day the question of where he’d learned to cope like this.
“Donal is furious with me,” she said, worrying a nail. “Nobody can hold a grudge like a Scot when his livelihood is threatened.”
“He’s pissed, maybe,” James replied, “and ashamed, but to do this, he’d have to have lost his mind, Vera. Was the man who agented you for years and the man you married crazy?”
Another wave of resentment welled up, but Vera understood this one better: perhaps she had married a crazy man, and what did that make her? Stupid, at the very least.
She’d gone through Band-Aid counseling when Donal had assaulted her. Three sessions of what to look for and what to expect after being the victim of a violent crime. Shame went with the territory: I should have known better. I should have fought back. I should have avoided the whole situation. I should have seen it coming. I should. I ought. Why didn’t I?
Then more second guessing when she’d let Donal off without criminal prosecution. Was that the best outcome for all concerned? For the children? For her? For Donal? His ex had called to thank her on behalf of the children, though Tina had also said Donal had never once in their seventeen years of marriage raised a hand to her or the children, and the assault was surely an aberration.
That call had been awkward but oddly comforting too.
“Cavalry’s arrived,” James said. A cruiser turned into the lane, lights flashing, but no siren, for which Vera was grateful. At first she thought it simple kindness, but then she recalled James saying the intruder might still be inside.
Protocol, then. Nothing to do with consideration for her or her privacy.
James consulted with the officers, then drove the SUV back to the house, the cruiser in the lead.
“Mrs. Waltham.” The deputy sheriff looked familiar to her. “Corporal Winters. I believe we’ve met.”
Oh, they’d met. Corporal Winters had been the first to respond to Katie’s 911 call when Donal had lost his temper with Vera. The corporal had seen Vera bruised, crying, and more distraught than she’d ever been in her life.
Another tough night. The toughest.
“We have met,” she said, shaking his proffered hand.
The two deputies first made sure the house was empty, then while his partner called for an evidence tech, Winters took a preliminary statement from Vera. Mac showed up at some point and attached himself to Winters’s partner, whom he seemed to know, and James…
James stood beside Vera the entire time, and when Winters had finished with his questions, James sat beside her on the front steps.
Such a pretty spring morning, brilliant sunshine showing every promise of chasing the chill from the air in weeks if not days. Birds sang, and even the loamy country air smelled happy.
“Would you rather wait in the car?” James asked. “Those heated seats have to be more comfortable than cold concrete.”
“You wait in the car if you want. I’ll wait here.”
“What are you waiting for, Vera?”
She sensed from James’s careful, quiet tone that he wasn’t being smart; he was trying to ask her something more subtle than she comprehended.
For his consideration, she’d walloped him with a load of attitude.
Or nerves. “I want these strangers out of my house.” Vera took a deep breath and let it out, the same as she would when facing a daunting program before a packed house. “This might be a crime scene, but it’s my crime scene, and where I live. Where Twyla lives. I perfected that brownie recipe here.”
Her voice caught, but she plowed on. “I want my house back, James. I want my property back. I want my privacy and my peace of mind. I need to see that my piano has not been vandalized, that my music is still where I shelved it, and my CDs are in order. I want to b-bake brownies… Oh, God, James. I am so angry. When will I stop being angry?”
She pitched into him and let the tears come, and all the while he held her and stroked her hair.
Vera had nearly composed herself when Mac came out the front door and down the steps, taking a seat on the side of Vera that James wasn’t occupying.
“How’re we doing?” Mac asked.
“We’re pissed and miserable,” Vera said. If she could have located genuine fear, she would have added that to the list, but maybe that was the morning’s lesson. Fear never solved a problem, never helped a marriage, never improved a performance.
So why give it a front-row reserved seat? Make the bastard cower in the obstructed-view seats, at least.
Mac looped an arm across Vera’s shoulders, while James’s stayed at her waist.
“Is James making you cry? If he is, I’ll beat him up for you.” Mac’s voice held a thread of hope.
“James hasn’t made me cry, MacKenzie. I’m weeping over having my house broken into, and my peace of mind stolen again, just when I thought life was settling down.”
“As if Mac could beat me up,” James scoffed.
“With one hand tied behind my back and giving you first swing,” Mac said. “The windows are the worst of it, but we found a message on your computer.”
“My computer?” Vera lifted her head from James’s shoulder. “I turned it off before I left last night. I’m sure of it. I always wipe down the screen and the keyboard at the end of the day, because Twyla can leave it sticky.”
“Somebody knew your password, then, because they opened the word-processing program and typed four words in forty-eight-point type: It’s all your fault. The ‘your’ was misspelled, made into the contraction.”
James shot a puzzled glance at his brother. “Fingerprints on the keyboard?”
“A few partials, and that might be enough. I assume Donal’s are on file?”
“They are,” Vera said. “He was arrested the night he assaulted me, and they took his prints. Maybe that was my fault too.” Though a detail bothered her: Donal had an excellent command of spelling and grammar.
“Taking prints is standard procedure,” Mac replied. “The damage inside is mostly shattered glass.”
“Mostly?” Vera had to ask, and also had to huddle closer to James.
“The deputies think there was some attempt to make this look like a robbery—a few drawers opened, the desk in your study rifled, but if it were a robbery, a pro would have covered his tracks. The longer a thief goes undetected, the harder it is to catch him. As break-ins go, you don’t have the wanton destruction of crackheads desperate for cash, either. The deputies are honestly puzzled as to motive.”
“The motive was to rattle me,” Vera said. “I refuse to accommodate whoever did this.”
A silence fell, and Vera realized that despite what had happened to her house, as she sat on the steps bookended by James and Mac, she felt safe. At that moment, she felt safe, if furious, but what about when darkness fell, and she was home alone with Twyla?
“You should come back to Trent’s with us,” Mac said. “We can get a gate up across your lane by tonight, and you can start making arrangements to have a security firm out here alarming the place to the teeth.”
James shifted in reaction to Mac’s words, but he said nothing.
“I don’t want to impose.” Vera had nearly said, I’ll be fine. She was not damned fine.
“So you’ll stay with us only when we’re the ones imposing?” James asked. “You’d sleep in the same bed, at the same house, with the same people in it as last night, Vera.”
Dratted lawyers. “It isn’t that,” she said, trying to sit up, but neither brother had removed his arm. “I need a piano. I haven’t practiced today, and the weekend’s coming, and I try not to do anything but my technique on weekends, because I want to spend the time with Twyla. That leaves only weekdays for repertoire, and with recital season coming up, the teaching schedule—you both think I’m silly.”
“We think you’re dedicated,” James said. “I have a piano and plenty of space. Stay with me.”
Three little words, but when she heard them, Vera’s insides rearranged themselves. The upheaval of once again being the victim of a crime settled down, but a different set of butterflies took flight.
“Thank you, but I don’t want to be parted from Twyla.”
“You and Twyla, stay with me. I have the room, I’m close to your house if you need anything, and I will physically tear the limbs off anybody who tries to harm you or your daughter.”
Ergo, the idea had significant appeal.
“That’s a sensible suggestion,” Mac said, his tone a little too casual. “You probably don’t want to be alone in this house until it’s thoroughly secured.”
Vera glanced over her shoulder at the house. She hadn’t lived there long enough to really turn it into a home, to domesticate and detail and build up the memories that made where she and her daughter slept into a home.
A strong, independent, self-sufficient woman knew when to accept help. “You’re right. You’re both right.”
“If you’d rather, I can stay with you here,” James said, “but you shouldn’t have to deal with this alone.”
“If you don’t want his ugly face staring at you over breakfast, I can make the same offer to stay here with you,” Mac said.
Vera thought back to breakfast with James, though it felt like another year, not mere hours ago. Cozy, pleasant, intimate.
And comfortable. Marvelously comfortable. “We can stay with James, but only until the house is fitted out with more security.”
“One of my clients owns a security firm,” James said. “I can call them for you now, or give you the number.”
“You two take care of that,” Mac said, rising in one lithe move. “I’ll find a broom and a dust pan and make a first pass at cleaning up the glass. Where’s the vacuum cleaner?”
“In the broom closet in the laundry room. But you don’t have to—”
He was already up the stairs and through the front door.
“Let him do it,” James said. “I am very much aware this is not the first time Mac has walked through a crime scene, but it’s probably the first time he’s known the victim on a first-name basis. Might be a good perspective for him to gain. You can do a walk through and determine if anything’s missing once Mac has finished.”
“He’s a criminal defense attorney, isn’t he?” Vera asked.
“One of the best in the state,” James said. “Let me find you the number for the security firm.” He passed Vera his phone a moment later.
When she said James Knightley had recommended the company to her, she was put through immediately to customer service. The rep knew the questions to ask, and promised to have someone at Vera’s door within the hour.
“And if you don’t mind,” James said, “I would like to be in evidence when that discussion takes place. Howard will cut you a better deal if I eavesdrop.”
An independent, self-sufficient woman who knew when to accept help also didn’t mind saving a buck here and there.
Thus Vera spent much of the day with James. He shooed his brother off to the farm-and-feed store, and finished cleaning up with Vera. By the time they were done, the estimator had arrived from the security firm. The cost wasn’t as bad as Vera had anticipated, but she attributed the reasonableness of the price to the occasional question from James.
They’d no sooner finished with the security firm rep than Mac arrived with lunch from a sub shop, the SUV loaded down with a haul from the local farm supply.
“They’ll drop the gate off at the foot of the lane before sunset,” Mac said. “We can hang it before dark, assuming I got the rest of James’s list right.”
“You can help,” James said to Vera. “We’ll use less bad language if you’re lending a hand.”
Vera liked their bad language, tame as it was. She mostly watched while Mac and James sank posts in concrete, wired a solar cell, and otherwise installed and assembled a reasonably attractive gate across her lane.
“Do they teach you how to do this in law school?” she asked when the job was done and most of the day gone.
“They do not,” Mac said. “This is Farm Boy 101, and you’ll have to ask James where he picked up the wiring.”
“Farm Boy 102,” James said, “which is for when you absolutely, positively must at least glance at the assembly instructions. We also learned, when it’s supper time, to put the tools away, or we might miss dessert.”
“Be dark soon,” Mac said. “I’d get what you need from the house now, Vera, and you and Twyla can head to James’s place after dinner.”
“And don’t say it.” James latched his two-ton tool case closed. “You can so impose for dinner. You barely ate any of your lunch, and Mac snitched half your fries. He spends too much time around criminals and claims some old property law case says if it’s a potato fried in oil, it be
longs to him. Louise will have wamped up a huge pot of spaghetti, and she does her garlic bread from scratch, so no sass from you, please.”
“Going Neanderthal on you,” Mac muttered. “Sure sign of low blood sugar.”
“And, you”—James rounded on his oldest brother—“am-scray, otherbray.”
“A bilingual Neanderthal,” Mac said, grinning. “I’ll see both of you back at the ranch, as they say.”
Mac kissed Vera’s cheek then sauntered off, leaving a whiff of clove and cinnamon on the air.
“He smells good.” Vera put a hand to her cheek, wondering how many other people shortchanged MacKenzie Knightley on first acquaintance. “He’s a very dear man, and he smells good.”
James caught her off guard when he leaned in right next to her ear. “I smell better.”
But he didn’t kiss her on the cheek, or anywhere else, either.
* * *
Twyla was quiet on the ride to James’s house, and James realized he had no idea what had been said to the child to explain their destination. As soon as they arrived, Vera went upstairs with Twyla while James fired up the wood stove and checked his email—his personal account, which few people had access to—and then his business account.
“You never made it to the office today,” Vera said, leaning on the doorjamb to his study twenty minutes later. “Are the messages piled up twenty deep?”
“Nothing that won’t wait until Tuesday.” James sternly admonished himself to ignore the sight of Vera Waltham wearing only an Eeyore nightie and a filmy excuse for a pink bathrobe. “That’s one of the perks of doing business law. Your clients work mostly business hours, and they seldom get arrested or have late-night domestic disputes. How’s Twyla?”
“Exhausted,” Vera said, coming into the room. “A few broken windows didn’t seem to bother her. She’s probably asleep already, and dreaming of barn chores and making spaghetti with Aunt Louise.”
“Aunt Judge,” James said, avoiding the study of Vera’s bare feet. Did she want him to lend her another pair of socks? “Louise’s vanity prefers that to Grandma Judge, which would be the more accurate title.”
The First Kiss Page 19