Everyone was assuming they had once been the Garcias. Scott was almost a hundred percent certain they were right.
An ambulance was over there, too, next to the forensics van. It was idling with its rear doors open, and as he got closer he saw that paramedics were doing something to Lisa’s left arm. Chase and his friends—God bless that kid with the metal detector—were standing around, looking proud of themselves. Rinko and Jantzen were there, too, talking to a pair of cops. Rinko, to whom he’d given a pretty good dressing-down for continuing to investigate the Garcia case against his express orders a little more than a week ago, looked slightly nervous as he watched Scott’s approach. Scott barely glanced at any of them. All his attention was for Lisa. She must have heard his approach, because she looked his way. She was pale and haunted-looking, her long black hair dripping water as it trailed toward the ground. Lying barefoot on a stretcher in the torn black rag that had once been the chic dress she’d worn to her mother’s funeral, soaking-wet and covered with mud, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.
“Hey.” His throat was so tight that that was all he could manage as he reached her. Pretty eloquent, huh? But it was the best he could do. He took her right hand, careful to be gentle. Her fingers twined with his.
“Scott.” She looked exhausted, but she smiled at him as she clung tightly to his hand. Looking down at her, he realized that that beautiful face with those big caramel-colored eyes was seared forever on his heart. Ryan’s theory about him never falling in love had officially been blown to smithereens. Whether she knew it or not, he was hers for life. “I was afraid I wasn’t ever going to see you again.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“It wasn’t my father.”
“I know.”
“It was Andy.”
“I know. He’s in jail. It’s looking like he killed the Garcias, too.”
“Mr. Buchanan?” One of the paramedics wrapped a blanket around Lisa as he spoke. Scott knew him, but he sought for and failed to remember his name. Probably it would come back to him sometime. When he hadn’t just been through the scare of a lifetime. “Could you stand back, please? We’ve got to load her up.”
Lisa’s hand tightened on his. Her eyes sought his and clung, a touch of panic in their depths. “Don’t leave me.”
Scott shook his head. “Not in this life.” He looked at the paramedic. “I’m going in the ambulance with her.”
The paramedic met his gaze and nodded.
After they got Lisa inside, Scott climbed in, too. He rode beside her, holding her hand all the way to the hospital.
By late that afternoon, after the hospital staff had checked her out and patched her up—she had a concussion, a badly bruised left arm, and other assorted small injuries but nothing serious enough to require her to stay overnight—they waited in the curtained-off room in the ER where she’d been treated for her to be discharged. She’d been allowed to shower, and she was dressed in a yellow T-shirt, a pair of white jeans, and some sandals, all of which Nola had brought with her when she had rushed to the hospital on getting word that Lisa had been found. There had been so many visitors after that that a nurse joked that instead of a curtain their room needed a revolving door. Even Grant had come. Scott and Lisa’s father had shaken hands, all animosity from their last encounter put aside in the light of Lisa’s safe recovery, but Grant hadn’t been able to have a private word with his daughter because there had been too many people around. Still, Scott thought Lisa had been pleased that her father had come. Finally there’d been so many people in the room that the staff had shooed everyone out except him, and that was only because he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere, and Lisa had made it clear that she didn’t want him to. At the moment she was propped up in the hospital bed while he sat in a chair beside her. Scott had just gotten off the phone with Watson, who had called to tell him that the baby whose skeleton they found beneath the fountain had definitely suffered from ARPKD. It would be a few weeks before the actual DNA tests came back, but as far as Scott was concerned, that made the baby’s identity definitive.
Something else he still had to tell Lisa. Tomorrow, maybe, when they weren’t both half dead from exhaustion and still shaken from the previous night’s trauma.
“What did he say?” Lisa was looking at him with a frown. Scott sighed. Since her mother’s death, he’d been keeping a lot of things from her that he thought might add to her distress. Chief among which was the fact that Angela Garcia had been more than eight months pregnant with Grant’s baby when she died, and that Lisa was, in fact, that child.
“How about we talk about it when we get home?” he asked. He had a feeling the conversation might get emotional, which could very well call for more privacy than a curtained-off cubicle in a busy hospital ER afforded.
She seemed to get that he didn’t feel this was the place to talk about it, because instead of arguing she nodded agreement. Then she smiled at him a little wryly. “Speaking of home, I guess I better start to think about getting my own place.”
He looked at her for a moment without saying anything.
“What?” she asked, wrinkling her brow at him.
“You’re welcome to stay with me for as long as you want.” The next bit was the part that bothered him, but he’d be damned if he would let it show. Just to make sure it didn’t, he kept his tone carefully casual. “It would be kind of a waste to rent something if you’re thinking about moving back to Boston anytime soon.”
It was what she had always meant to do after her mother died, he knew.
“I’m not sure about moving back to Boston now.” She looked at him steadily. “What I do next kind of depends.”
His pulse started pumping a little faster. He knew his girl inside and out, and that was a statement designed to lead to a question with an answer he could see coming a mile away.
He asked the question. “On what?”
She smiled at him, a heart-stoppingly beautiful smile that blinded him to everything except her.
“You.”
There it was, the answer he’d been expecting. Was that a lead-in or what? Or maybe it wasn’t meant as such, and he was about to get burned. Whatever, he was going for it. All or nothing, that was how he felt about her. How he had always felt about her.
“You could stay here,” he said. “And marry me.”
She looked at him with widening eyes. “You’re proposing.”
“Yep.”
“I don’t believe it.”
He stood up, suddenly restless under her fascinated regard. “Is that an answer?”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed at her.
“No, it isn’t an answer,” she clarified. Then she grinned at him, his own beautiful Lisa with a lifetime’s worth of mischief in her eyes. “My answer is yes.”
Scott took a deep breath. Then he stood up and took the two steps required to bring him to her bedside. She was already reaching out for him when he got there, and the gentle, tender kiss he’d meant to give her was turning into something a whole lot hotter when the curtain behind them slid back with a rattle.
Giving him a disapproving look, the nurse who’d been taking care of Lisa all day walked into the room. “Here are your discharge papers, Ms. Grant.”
Later, when they got back home, he did it up right: went down on one knee, told her that he loved her more than anybody or anything in his life. He said all the mushy stuff he never thought in a million years he’d ever say, and he meant every word of it.
Then he kissed her and took her to bed. Where, too exhausted to make love, they immediately fell asleep.
They made love the next morning. And after that, while they were still in bed and she was still curled up warm and soft in his arms, Scott bit the bullet and told her the truth about her parentage.
“That means—my mother isn’t my real mother. All those years—all my life—she loved me so much. And I loved her. And all of it
—everything, my whole life—it was all a lie.”
There was so much heartbreak in her voice that Scott felt her pain like a knife to his chest. Then he realized: From then on, for the rest of his life, whatever hurt Lisa was going to hurt him more.
A love like that was a scary thing. But he was in it now, head over heels, so all that was left to do was deal.
He gathered her close and plunged in. “The love wasn’t a lie. She loved you more than anything in her life. You were her shining star, her reason for getting up in the morning. And you loved her like any devoted daughter loves her mother. That makes her your real mother, and you her real daughter. That bond is as enduring as it gets.”
Then he kissed her. And made love to her. And after that, just to make sure she got the message, he made love to her again.
35
By that afternoon, Lisa was feeling recovered enough to drive out to the Woodford County jail and watch through a big one-way mirror as the county DA, a dynamic, sixtyish woman with chin-length gray hair and a nice taste in pastel suits named Janice Bernard, along with Detective Watson, interviewed Robin. Yesterday’s interview had been postponed, Detective Watson said, after she’d been found and the bodies had been discovered. Scott was with her, of course. The way she was feeling right now, they were joined at the hip for the rest of their lives. She was crazy in love with him; he’d proposed marriage; he was hers. Her amazing lover, her soon-to-be husband, her family now. He was showing no propensity to let her out of his sight, either. Probably it was going to take them both a little while to recover from the trauma of the night she had disappeared. But tomorrow, Scott had told her mock-sternly, life started getting back to normal. To begin with, they both had to go back to work.
Which was fine with her. She was suddenly craving normal. And normal with Scott? That could be fun. Things were never going to be the same. Her mother—yes, her mother, no matter what the biology was, which, as Scott had pointed out, didn’t make one iota of difference to love, anyway—was gone. Many changes were coming. But normal life—the new normal life—was looking bright.
Barty was there with them in the viewing room. He’d asked to be present, not so much for his concern over what had happened to her and her mother as because of his connection to the Garcias, Lisa suspected, and because of his position, they’d bent over backward to accommodate him. Lisa still had mixed emotions about her father. It was good to know that he wasn’t a murderer, but that still left him with much—her whole life, in fact—to atone for.
Looking through the glass, Lisa saw Robin seated in the small, beige, windowless room on one side of a long conference table with the prosecutor and Detective Watson sitting opposite her, and felt sick. Her mother had loved this woman and trusted her. Lisa had, too.
Ms. Bernard started off. “All right, Mrs. Baker, the first thing I want to do is tell you that we have proof, by means of certain items found with the remains, including a set of military dog tags with Andrew Frye’s name on them, that your brother was the shooter in the Garcia family murder. I have no doubt that the DNA evidence that was recovered, when it comes back from the lab, will provide further confirmation. What this means is that we no longer need your testimony to get a conviction, which makes your position precarious. If you lie to us, if you are caught in a lie, that will be grounds to withdraw the very lenient plea agreement which we entered into with you in an attempt to locate Lisa Grant. In fact, I’ve been informed that you’ve already lied to us in that, when you were asked where Ms. Grant had been taken, you claimed you did not know. Suppose you explain that.”
Robin looked frightened. “I—I didn’t know. Not for sure. Andy put her in his truck, in his gun box in the back. And I got in the cab with him, and he dropped me off at the grocery store because we knew we had to go back to the house, knew there’d be this big to-do when that Buchanan boy discovered she was gone, and Andy thought that if we came back with groceries that would give us an alibi. He thought that would be enough.”
“Come on, you may not have known for sure, but you had a pretty good idea where he was taking her. You knew he was going to kill her. Of course he was going to put her in the place where the Garcias’ bodies had stayed so well hidden all these years.” Detective Watson’s gaze was blistering. Lisa, watching through the glass, had never thought she was going to like the man, but she was starting to.
Robin’s hands, square and blunt-fingered and oh, so familiar, rested palms down on the wooden table. They came together as she suddenly clasped them in front of her. She looked at Ms. Bernard. “We never wanted to kill her. Not Lisa. This is all just one big mess! If Lisa hadn’t come back home, if she hadn’t started working for that damned boy in that damned office, if she hadn’t found that picture and started nosing into what happened to those people, everything would have gone along just like it was doing, just fine. I thought Andy was going to die when she came home one day and started asking about those Garcias. Then I saw that file from where they disappeared in her bedroom, and I told him, and we knew we had to do something to get rid of it and get her mind on something else. If we just took the file, that would just make her more interested in it, we thought, because she’d wonder why someone had taken it. Anyway, there was only us and Lynn in the house, so it would have been obvious it was us, wouldn’t it? So Andy started a little fire, just a little fire right down the hallway from Lisa’s bedroom. We thought that in all the confusion, what with fire trucks coming and everything, she probably wouldn’t miss it later, and if she did she would probably think that it got thrown out in the cleanup or something, because we were going to get in there and grab it as soon as she ran out.”
“So, Andrew Frye—Andy—set the fire.” Ms. Bernard’s expression was impassive. Unlike Detective Watson, whom Lisa was beginning to realize showed everything he was thinking on his face, she was hard to read.
“Yes. But we didn’t mean to hurt Lisa, or Miss Martha, or anybody else. We just wanted to get that file away from her. Only Andy forgot about Miss Martha’s spare oxygen tanks, which were stored in her old bedroom right up there by Lisa’s. That’s what did it. The fire got to them and the whole place just went up. That we never expected.”
Lisa remembered the fire and shuddered. If it hadn’t been for Scott, she might have died that night. He was standing beside her, between her and Barty, acting as kind of a buffer. He must have felt her shudder, because he put an arm around her. She leaned against his side.
“You didn’t mean to hurt anybody.” That was Detective Watson, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Ms. Bernard shot him a quelling look.
“No! We never did! Andy never did. But Lisa wouldn’t leave it alone. It was because she looked so much like them. If we’d realized she was going to look like that, we never would ’ve . . . well. Anyway, after the fire we really started getting scared. Those dog tags you were talking about. Andy always wore them around his neck, from the time he got out of the service, and he knew he had lost them. He thought the chain had broken in the kitchen of that house the Garcias were renting, that night—well, that night. He knew if the dog tags were found, people would start looking at him. He’d searched for them before, but everything had died down over the years so he’d almost forgotten about them. But when Lisa started stirring things up, he went back to look one more time. He started thinking they might have fallen down the heating vent or something. He was in the house when there she was, poking around outside. When she started to come in, he couldn’t let her see him, so he had to do what he did. But he hated to do it, and he wouldn’t have done it if she’d just let things alone. Which she never did do.”
“So, it was all her fault.” Detective Watson had at least succeeded in tamping down on the sarcasm. Still, Ms. Bernard shot him another of those warning glances.
“It was! It really was. You’d think, after Andy had to hit her over the head, she would have left it alone. But she didn’t. Lisa’s like that, you know. Real stubborn when she sets her mind to something. Mis
s Martha was always saying she didn’t know where that had come from.”
On Scott’s other side, Barty made a restive movement. Lisa wondered, then, if Angela Garcia—impossible to think of her as her mother—had been stubborn. Of course Barty had known her well. Been in love with her, even. Lisa found she didn’t much like the idea of that. Her loyalty to her mother was still strong.
“So, from there Andy decided to kill Mrs. Martha Grant by staging the car accident in which she drowned.” Ms. Bernard’s voice was as calm as if she was discussing what to have for lunch. Her hands clenching around the smooth wooden bar that kept them a few inches back from the glass, Lisa began to shiver. Scott, shooting her a concerned look, tightened his arm around her.
“You don’t have to listen to this, you know,” he said in her ear. “You can wait outside.”
Lisa shook her head. “I’m staying.” Then she gritted her teeth, willed the tremors racking her to stop, and turned her attention back to the room on the other side of the glass.
“. . . never meant for Miss Martha to die!” Robin was leaning forward earnestly, talking to Ms. Bernard. “Andy didn’t even know she was in the car. ‘What was she doing in there?’ was what he asked afterwards. She never rode in Lisa’s car; it was too hard getting her in and out. And Andy was there in his truck across the street from the hospital parking lot when Lisa left, so you’d think he would have seen. But he didn’t. It was just that he had to stay way back, out of the way, because that Buchanan boy”—Robin said that with real venom this time—“had somebody following Lisa, keeping an eye on her, sometimes. Andy had been following her real close, just to see if he couldn’t get a chance to maybe cause her to have a little fender bender, or do something else to scare her, just to give her thoughts another direction, you know, than those Garcias, until he figured out that somebody else was following her, too, then figured out who. But that night, Andy saw nobody was following her and he saw the chance to make her wreck her car. He wasn’t really trying to kill her. He thought she’d survive, maybe have to go to the hospital. But maybe she’d be thinking about something besides those people, after that.”
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