“Don’t let go.” His voice faded. Sam stroked his hair, dried it with a corner of the quilt, and hugged her bare leg over his hips. She wanted to wrap him a cocoon so safe, so dreamless, he’d wake up with the old serenity in his eyes. “Promise me you won’t go back to the house site tomorrow. Just try to stay away from it for one day. Rest. Please.”
“I promise.” His breathing slowed. He slept finally. Sam rose on one elbow and rested her cheek against his head. The rain stopped and faint moonlight eased through the windows. It reflected off the glass jar containing the ruby, on the dresser. Sam stared at the intruding glimmer defiantly. Aunt Alex’s bitter feud with Sarah because of the ruby, a feud that had separated Sam from Jake for most of their lives. The day Tim had assaulted Charlotte when he found her admiring his mother’s necklace. The fear and anger in Aunt Alex’s eyes when Ellie had discovered the ruby inside that necklace. Jake’s bewildering obsession with it. The sight of him searching for the stone in the shambles of his sister’s room, and his look of revulsion after he found it.
Her nerves were strained to the limit; otherwise, she would never have allowed the bitter, senseless thought she had before exhaustion overcame her.
She would never feel safe with that ruby in their house.
Sam woke with a start, alone. Sunlight streamed through the windows. She bolted out of bed, her cotton gown stiff with dried water and grime from Jake’s clothes, looking around for him wildly. The bedsheets were a dirt-stained shambles; she ran a hand over Jake’s empty place, alarmed when the cool sheets told her he’d left some time ago.
She threw her robe on and dashed to their bathroom, hoping she’d find him in the shower. When she didn’t, she ran through the house, calling his name. Bo met her in the hall, whining. Charlotte, sluggishly contemplating a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table, stared at her anxiously. Sam gripped the table’s edge. “Have you seen Jake?”
“No. I figured he went, went there, you know.” Charlotte’s head drooped. She had trouble talking about Sarah, Hugh, Ellie, or their house. “Like he does every morning.”
He promised me he wouldn’t go. Sam hurried outside, dread and disappointment twisting her stomach. Frosty air bit into her bare legs and feet. Her station wagon still sat in its spot at the end of the driveway, but his enormous old Cadillac was gone.
Maybe he’d driven over. She dug the keys from under the station wagon’s front seat and followed his tire tracks down the narrow, winding lane to the little road that ran through the Cove. Sam slammed on the brakes and got out, shivering. His car tracks turned left, out of the Cove, not toward his parents’ house.
She was dizzy with confusion and fear. Where had he gone without telling her? There had never been any important secrets between them; now he left on lonely missions without even bothering to explain.
Shaking, she returned to the house. Charlotte stood on the porch, wringing her hands in the bottom of her pink sweatshirt. “Where is he?”
“Gone. Somewhere. I don’t know.” Sam walked inside leadenly and went through each room in a daze of worry, as if her aimless wandering might turn up clues. When she ended up in their bedroom, she sat on the bed’s edge, staring into space.
Her gaze shifted angrily to the jar atop their dresser.
The ruby was gone too.
I did it. I paid that bastard back but good, and no one will ever find out. Malcolm reveled in his accomplishment with endless satisfaction. He had nothing left but that one victory, and it consumed him. He trudged up the last flight of echoing metal stairs to his third floor apartment, his ragged, syrupy breaths eased by the thought that he had elevated himself from dying petty con artist to dying arsonist and murderer.
Flush with new confidence, he decided he’d visit Mrs. Lomax and insist she provide him with a nice condominium and job-free security as well as medical expenses. He really didn’t deserve to spend the remainder of his life as a church janitor, living in a shabby apartment building with no elevator.
Smiling, he unlocked the dented metal door to his apartment and stepped inside. The fading light from a sliding glass door to the balcony obscured the dingy furniture. He pictured himself lounging in a plush recliner in his new condo.
A powerful arm circled his throat from behind. The door clanged shut.
Malcolm made a gurgling sound and struggled. He was thin and weak; his unknown attacker towered over him and seemed to be built of unyielding granite. Silently the man dragged him across the small living room. Stangling, Malcolm flailed his arms and legs. One hand fumbled in a pocket of his dingy khaki jacket and grabbed a knife. But he had never been adept when it came to physical survival; his skills lay in the more refined art of emotional manipulation.
He pressed the release button on the switchblade, and stabbed himself in the side.
Malcolm’s pained screech was choked off by the crushing arm around his neck. A second later he was sprawled facedown on the thin brown carpet, his knife snatched away from him, his arms pinned behind his back with bone-crushing force.
“You killed my family,” a deep voice drawled. Shock and disbelief reduced Malcolm to gasping sputters. The identity of his violent visitor was as clear to him as the sharp pain in his side. How was this possible? To be hunted down by Jake Raincrow again, when there was no trail, no proof …
Mrs. Lomax told him about me. She played both sides. She wants me dead now.
“You set the fire,” that same lethally calm voice continued. “She told you who I was and where to find me. But you made a mistake. You didn’t get me. The worst mistake you’ll ever make.”
Malcolm squirmed helplessly. Bile surged into his mouth, and a coughing spasm shook him. His eyes clamped shut. He was dragged to his knees. A thick-fingered hand closed tightly under his jaw. He stared into a rough young face and eyes as merciless as an animal’s.
I should kill him, Jake thought. For my family, for me, for Samantha. Kill him. Never tell a soul I did it, or why.
Samantha. The truth would haunt her the way it haunted him. His family was dead because of her aunt’s schemes.
And all he had to prove it was Malcolm Drury, a piece of shit in a human skin who’d served time in the Bahamas for cocaine. Any homicide detectives worth their pay would doubt Malcolm’s story—a story that linked the lieutenant-governor’s wife to murder, a story that would sound like bizarre lies concocted by a sick, desperate man.
Justice would be surer if Jake strangled him and walked out.
But then what? Live with the knowledge that he could never prove Alexandra was to blame for it all? Prowl the edges of her life looking for ways to punish her?
Or slip inside Highview some night when he knew she was alone and choke the breath out of her the way the fire had choked his parents and Ellie.
Murder two people. He, who had given up hunting and fishing years before because he knew what his prey felt as it suffered and died.
Could he kill Samantha’s flesh and blood and not feel her soul in his hands? Could he look into Samantha’s peaceful, unsuspecting eyes every day and night for the rest of their lives and believe with all his heart that he’d saved much more than he’d destroyed?
“I’m not going to hurt you anymore,” Jake told Malcolm slowly. “If you tell me what I want to know.” Jake vaulted to his feet, lifted Malcolm by the shoulders of his jacket, then set him in a sagging armchair. Malcolm hunched over, moaning, sweat sliding down his face. “You’re going to tell me everything,” Jake continued. “And then I’m taking you to the police. And you’ll repeat it for them.”
Malcolm seemed on the verge of hysteria. He rocked back and forth, his mouth moving soundlessly.
“Talk,” Jake commanded with soft contempt. He wound a hand into the collar of Malcolm’s jacket. “If you don’t, I’ll break every goddamned bone in your body.”
The sudden, unmistakable sound of footsteps climbing the stairs seeped through Malcolm’s fog of panic. He sagged with relief. Jake absorbed every vivid thought
.
It was Monday. Bible-study night. Members of the congregation took turns bringing him dinner and salvation once a week. Well, tonight they had brought the only brand of salvation Malcolm wanted. All he thought he had to do was stall until a knock came at the door, then scream for help.
Jake pulled a faded bandanna from a pocket of his jeans, pried Malcolm’s mouth open, and stuffed the bandanna into it. He clamped a hand over Malcolm’s lips and shook his head when Malcolm gagged. “No, you won’t scream,” Jake told him.
Malcolm’s eyes rolled back. His chest heaved. Jake jerked him to his feet. “You’re not going to strangle on your own vomit. Not until I’m done with you anyway.”
Jake dragged him to the glass door, slid it open, and tugged most of the bandanna from his mouth. He rested his hand on Malcolm’s throat, his fingertips pressing carefully into the skin. “Make one sound and I’ll rip your windpipe out.”
Malcolm’s head moved weakly, and he inhaled. Jake tried to measure the footsteps against the background noise from the street below the balcony, where men’s voices rose in a loud argument over the price of a motorcycle.
The footsteps halted on the landing outside the apartment door. Someone knocked lightly. Malcolm’s eyes settled in their sockets, and he stared at Jake, the bandanna hanging from his lips like a long red-checkered tongue. “Mr. Drury?” The visitor’s voice was muffled by the door. “Malcolm, it’s Harold Johnson. From the church. I’m your prayer partner this week. I’ve brought a pizza. Malcolm?”
The knocking started again. Malcolm shuddered and moaned. Jake tightened the pressure on his thin neck. The pulse beat wildly against his palm. Repulsed by the pity he suddenly felt, Jake looked away from him.
A minute later the visitor called out, “All right, Malcolm, I saw your car in the parking lot. But I’m not going to force pizza and fellowship on you. If you’re hiding in there, I just want you to think about God’s disappointment, not mine. Good night.”
The footsteps retreated. Jake sighed with relief and rewarded Malcolm by moving his grip to the back of Malcolm’s coat.
That small show of mercy doomed him.
Malcolm lurched forward on the narrow balcony and clawed the bandanna from his mouth. “Help me!” he screamed. “I’m being murdered! Help me!”
Jake yanked backward just as Malcolm took another desperate leap. Malcolm’s baggy, unzipped coat slid off.
And the same fateful momentum that had propelled Malcolm Drury through life carried him over the balcony’s rusty iron rail.
Jake was at the rail in one quick step, hands out, the coat dangling from one as if he could net his prey in midair. He watched, stunned, as the man he had decided not to kill plunged headfirst onto the sidewalk three floors down.
The men who had been arguing over the motorcycle gawked at the limp body and the blood-speckled concrete around Malcolm’s head.
Then they looked up at Jake.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
This couldn’t be happening. Not this, after the fire, the funerals, the endless grief. She could not be following a deputy down the narrow, too brightly lit hallway of the Durham city jail, leaving a shell-shocked Charlotte and Joe Gunther in the lobby.
Jake couldn’t belong in this place, charged with killing a man who was supposed to have disappeared permanently into a Bahama prison.
How had Jake discovered he’d come back to the States? And why, God, hadn’t Jake told her he was going to find him?
“Here you go,” the deputy said, not unkindly, as he stopped before a thick metal door and inserted a key in the lock. She wouldn’t have been allowed to see Jake tonight if the sheriff hadn’t given special permission. Jake had tracked for him.
She had to get permission from a sheriff to see her own husband.
Sam forced that thought out of her mind. She was operating on numb disbelief and adrenaline; any break in her concentration would make this all too real, and she’d fold up like an accordion.
She jumped at the sound of the lock turning. The thought of Jake behind a locked door made her sick. The door had a small peephole of a window reinforced with crisscrossed wires. This was a place where windows meant someone was always watching.
Stop thinking. You can let yourself think only about how to get Jake out of here.
Her legs shook. She stepped into a small bare room with no other windows, a metal table, and two chairs. A merciless fluorescent light fixture made spots dance in her vision.
And the sight of Jake facing her across the room, his tall, lean body encased in a prisoner’s baggy white shirt and trousers, made the spots converge into a black haze. She staggered and gripped her forehead with both hands, fighting the darkness with a furious surge of willpower.
Jake caught her by the shoulders and held her up, but resisted when she tried to hug him. She stared at him with torturous confusion.
Jake wanted nothing more than to have Samantha’s arms around him, but he fought the selfish need with every ounce of strength. Clara Big Stick’s premonitions had come true, because he refused to take them seriously, because he’d thought he and Samantha were invincible when they were together. That damned confidence had made him blind. The evil he’d respected as a child had never been conquered; it had waited, a ravenmocker laughing in the darkness.
Now his family was dead, his future belonged to strangers who were convinced he’d killed a man, and no one stood between Alexandra and what she wanted. She wanted control of Samantha and Charlotte. She wanted the ruby back.
He’d had time to think through the consequences and decide what he had to do. The gift he’d lived with all his life had never seemed more like a curse. The truth that only he knew, and how he knew it, would sound crazy to a jury. And maybe to Sam, no matter how much she loved him.
His worst fear was that she would believe him. If he told her why he’d sought out Malcolm Drury, and what her aunt had to do with it, she’d go after Alexandra.
Alexandra would eat her alive.
He had to get Samantha as far away from her as he could. But there was only one way he could make her leave him. By driving her away.
Sam locked her hands into his shirt and continued to search his face desperately. His expression was stiff, his gaze agonized and strangely unwelcoming. He released her and dropped his hands by his sides.
“Are you all right?” she asked. An absurd question, but rational thought had deserted her. She ran her fingertips over his head and chest in a frantic examination, reduced to searching for invisible injuries as if she could erase the real one that way.
Jake stepped back and caught her hands as if he didn’t want her to touch him. “You’re the only one I’m worried about,” he said.
“Why didn’t you call me instead of Joe? Why did I have to hear about this from someone else?”
“Because I know how bad it sounds. I wanted someone I trust to be with you.”
He was the one in jail, but he was worried about her. Sam said in a choked voice, “You found out Malcolm Drury had come back, and you had to make certain he wouldn’t bother us. You were so afraid something else would happen. Isn’t that it?”
“Yes.”
“I should never have told you about him.” Her voice shook. “I despised him for stealing from my mother. I wanted something terrible to happen to him. It did. He was stupid enough to smuggle drugs, and someone pointed him out to the police in the Bahamas, and they caught him. Case closed.” Shame washed over her as she realized she was berating Jake. She bowed her head. “You didn’t kill him. Joe told me what you said. He fell. It was an accident.”
“That’s not how it looks. There’s not a chance in hell a court will let me walk away from it.”
“Don’t you dare stand there and tell me you’re giving up before we’ve even started fighting! You’re not going to prison!”
“Yes, I am.” He said it with a kind of eerie certainty that frightened her so badly, she gagged. She turned her face and
cupped a hand over her mouth, shutting her eyes, struggling for control. He pulled her against him with a convulsive sigh, pressed his face into her hair, and held her fiercely. She felt his tears slipping down her cheek, and cried with him.
Alexandra crossed the parking lot of the Durham motel with eager strides. She was pleased with herself—amazed at the way one, small push had started a perfect chain of events.
Malcolm Drury was dead, taking any threat to her with him. Sarah and her brood were gone. Jake was as good as dead. Orrin—dear, loving Orrin, who thought she was distraught over the events—had studied the evidence against Jake and sadly confirmed Alexandra’s hope. No jury was likely to acquit Jake, and a murder conviction carried a long prison term before any chance of parole.
Samantha was only nineteen. She’d get on with her life and forget about him. All Alexandra had to do was take advantage of the situation. She searched the line of numbered doors and nodded with satisfaction when she found the one she wanted.
Alexandra laughed. Wasn’t fate undoubtedly on her side? Who would have thought her problems could solve themselves so beautifully, with no liability to her and very little effort on her part?
She knocked softly. The door opened a crack. Charlotte stared at her from beneath the guard chain. Her eyes were more startlingly blue than Alexandra remembered, and there was a hard edge to their unflinching gaze.
“Let me in, dear. Samantha asked me to come.”
“I know. I tried to talk her out of it.” Charlotte opened the door. Alexandra saw no sign of Samantha in the small, efficient room. The door to the bath was closed. She heard the muffled sound of running water.
Stepping inside, Alexandra gracefully removed her tailored coat and draped it over a chair, feeling Charlotte’s eyes watching every move suspiciously. Alexandra had dressed in casual slacks and an old blazer, thinking it made her appear unforbidding and sincere.
She appraised Charlotte’s bare feet, tight jeans, sloppy pink sweater, and shaggy blond hair with hidden dismay. Unlike Samantha, Charlotte had a trashy streak. Apparently, the Raincrows had encouraged it. “Let me tell you something,” Charlotte said, sliding plump, stubby hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “If you upset Sam any more than she already is, I’ll rip your fucking head off.”
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