Passion

by Marilyn Pappano

  He wanted to contradict her, to inform her that, yes, someday soon—if this ended soon, if he was able to prove his identity and to do it without getting himself killed—she would have that kind of money. He would see to it.

  But those were some mighty big ifs.

  “Did you call your banker?” she asked as he got two sodas from the refrigerator, then sat down opposite her.

  He nodded, but she didn’t say anything. She simply waited for him to elaborate. “I’ll get the statement from him on Wednesday.”

  She didn’t look at him as she began unwrapping one of the two sandwiches she’d removed from the bag. “Where is this bank?”

  “Denver.”

  “Do you plan to go back there when this is over? To Colorado?”

  They hadn’t talked much about the future, although he wasn’t surprised that she was thinking about it. Of course, they faced two totally different futures and with two totally different attitudes. She was looking forward to getting her life back to normal, to reclaiming her home and her peace of mind, to being left alone to live the way she wanted. She was anticipating the day he would be gone, the time when she would never have to deal with him again.

  He wasn’t.

  And he didn’t think, when that time came, when his life returned to his own sad version of normal, that it would happen in Colorado. At the moment, he couldn’t imagine returning to his mountaintop. It had provided exactly what he needed those years he’d lived there—solitude, a measure of peace, a few good memories—but not anymore. What he needed in his future would be nowhere to be found—at least, not for him. He had promised her that he would make things right, and at the top of that list was getting out of her life. After all he’d put her through, she deserved that and more. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find some place even more remote. Maybe I’ll buy an island.”

  “And surf all day.”

  “And write all night.” He watched her gaze shift to the legal pad. The edges of the pages he’d filled with scenes were ruffled, a few of the corners bent in crooked triangles. She studied it a moment as she chewed a bite of her sub, but she didn’t ask what it was. She didn’t ask if she could see it. Part of him was glad because, other than the proposals he’d submitted to Rebecca and Candace Baker, he’d never shared any part of a work in progress with anyone. It seemed too personal, too intimate—and, of course, he’d never had anyone to share it with. At the same time, though, he was more than a little sorry that she didn’t ask. He wanted her to see that he could write. He wanted her to know that he was writing Liane’s story, wanted her to know that he was doing it especially for her. He wanted her to get a little personal, a little intimate.

  Even if she did ask, he acknowledged, he would have to say no. Those were possibly the most important pages he had ever written. They could go a long way toward convincing Teryl that everything he’d told her was true. They could make her believe in him. Before he gave them to her to read, they needed more work. They had to be polished. They had to be perfect.

  “Caribbean or Pacific?” She was looking at him now, the pad and the remarks about writing apparently gone from her mind.

  It took him a moment to get his mind back on the subject of islands. “Surfing’s better in the Pacific.” And the Caribbean was too damned close to New Orleans. It would be too easy to break his promise to her, to just show up there one day, to torment himself with what he couldn’t have.

  “Someplace around Hawaii or farther south?” she asked.

  “Farther south. Someplace exotic.”

  At that she laughed. “When you’re never traveled outside the southern U.S., all islands seem exotic. Have you ever been in that part of the world?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then how do you know you’ll like it? How do you know you won’t be bored silly by ocean waves, tropical breezes, and all the scantily clad native girls?”

  “Liking it has nothing to do with it.” Putting distance between himself and all the significant places—and people—in his life did. Staying away from Janie in Florida, his parents in California, Teryl here or in New Orleans or wherever she settled—those were the important things.

  “Liking it has everything to do with it,” she disagreed. “How can you be happy in a place…” Abruptly, her voice trailed away. Her cheeks tinged pink, she focused her attention on her lunch.

  What was she thinking? That happiness didn’t rank very high in his life and never would? That he’d known so little happiness that he’d grown used to its absence? For a long time, he had been accustomed to it. Over the years he’d found his own substitutes—satisfaction with a well-written book, enjoyment in a climb up his mountain, relaxation in a summer storm, pleasure in making love, exceptional pleasure in making love with her—but he still missed being happy. He missed the overall sense of well-being that came from fitting properly into all the spaces of your life and sharing it with people you cared about. He missed waking up in the morning and thinking, This is going to be a good day, instead of, Here’s another day I have to struggle through.

  “You adjust,” he said quietly, watching as she slowly brought her gaze back to his. “If you have what you need, you can adapt even to a place you detest.”

  Her voice was just as quiet when she responded. “And what you need is to be Simon Tremont.”

  What he needed was her. Didn’t she know that yet?

  With a shrug, he rose from the table, threw the wrapper from his lunch into the wastebasket, then leaned against the counter. “Simon is mine. I created him. I have a right to be him.”

  She started to speak, then broke off as the phone beside him rang. When she made no move to get up, he answered on the second ring, and what he heard in response to his greeting immediately drew his attention away from her.

  “Teryl Weaver, please. This is Sheriff Logan Cassidy of the Grant County, Colorado, Sheriff’s Department.”

  Although he’d spoken to the man on only one occasion, he recognized the voice even without the name. His first reaction was surprise. He had intended to call the sheriff today, to give him Teryl’s address so the arson reports could be forwarded to him. Had the sheriff somehow tracked him down? But that was impossible; no one was that good. That meant Cassidy wasn’t initiating this contact. He was returning a call he had missed presumably earlier in the day. It meant Teryl had called him. It meant she was checking up on John.

  His gaze locked with hers, he replied in an even voice. “Just a minute, Sheriff. I’ll get her.”

  She looked startled and guilty as she approached to take the phone. She must have given Cassidy her office number, John presumed, so he wouldn’t accidentally take the call, so he wouldn’t find out that she was trying to prove or disprove his story. Someone at the Robertson office must have given him this number.

  Taking the phone from him, she wrapped her fingers tightly around it. “Do you mind?”

  Why did she want privacy for the call? Because she simply wasn’t comfortable discussing him while he stood there in front of her? Because she felt guilty for telling him this morning that she trusted him, then going to work and calling the sheriff to see if he was trustworthy? Or because she expected the sheriff to substantiate her suspicions that he was mental? Because she didn’t believe Cassidy would support anything John had told her. Because she didn’t want to try to hide her doubts and misgivings. Because she didn’t want to give him cause for anger.

  Fighting the same peculiar stubbornness that had so often gotten him into trouble with his father, he started toward the door. There he looked back. “I want to talk to him when you’re finished.” When she nodded, he walked away, down the hall and into the living room. He went to stand at the French doors, staring out at flowers wilting under the day’s heat. From the kitchen, he could hear Teryl’s voice, a soft murmur, the words indistinct.

  He wasn’t angry with her for calling Cassidy. Under the circumstances, it was the smart thing to do. But he was a little disappointed. He’
d wanted her to do something no one had done since he was nineteen years old: to have faith in him, to believe him because he said so, not because someone else did. He’d wanted her to trust him, to take him at his word.

  Obviously he was asking for too much. Despite the intimacy they had shared, they were still strangers. He had begun their relationship with half-truths and clouded motives. He had kidnapped her, had subjected her to nights of misery and terror. He had made claims too outrageous to believe and had forced her into helping him try to prove them. He was a fool to think she might ever overlook all that. He was a damned fool to hope she might ever forgive it.

  After a while he realized that the hum of her voice had ended. The awareness of that fact brought with it acknowledgment of another: he was no longer alone in the room. She was standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest, watching him. “He’s waiting.”

  He followed her back to the kitchen, picking up the phone from the counter. He identified himself before asking, “When do you think the reports will be ready, Sheriff?”

  “I’m waiting on the final report from the state’s investigators. I should have it in a few days. Where do you want it sent?”

  “To Richmond, Virginia. The address is…” He glanced at Teryl, standing now next to the table, and she murmured her address, pausing so he could repeat it to the sheriff.

  Cassidy read it back for confirmation, then asked, “Do you want me to go over what I told Ms. Weaver?”

  “No, thanks. Teryl can tell me. I appreciate your help, Sheriff.” He hung up, then watched Teryl. Her hands were gripped tightly around the chair back. “When did you call him?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. When we got back from the office.” She raised her head, her posture and manner becoming defensive, but she didn’t look at him. “I won’t apologize for it.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

  “There’s so little you’ve told me that can be verified by someone else. I had to ask the sheriff about this.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  She drew a deep breath. “That you bought the land eleven years ago, that the house was built a year later, that you paid cash for both. He said most people in the county never knew the place—or you—existed. He said the first time he met you was a week and a half ago, when you walked into his office and said your house had been destroyed by an explosion.”

  He wondered if the sheriff had told her how much the land and the house had cost, if he’d given her some idea of just how much cash had been involved. A hundred acres of mountaintop land with some of the best views in the state, a location so isolated that he’d had to pay premium prices just to get a construction crew up there, a twenty-five-hundred-square-foot house with no expense spared, getting the power lines extended miles from the nearest terminal point—none of it had come cheap. Most people would never see that much money at one time in their entire lives. But a best-selling, overnight-success, first book wonder using the name of Simon Tremont had.

  Deliberately he argued with her. “He told you that John Smith had bought the land, that John Smith’s house had been destroyed. How do you know he meant me?”

  “He described you, down to the truck you’re driving and the shoes you’re wearing right now. He said the house burned a week and a half ago. The official cause is arson, the means three incendiary devices.” She stumbled over those last two words, unfamiliar, a complicated way of saying bombs. “He said the fire burned so hot and the house went up so quickly that everything was lost. He said you were incredibly lucky to escape with nothing more than the laceration on your arm.”

  John felt tension he hadn’t even been aware of draining from his body, felt the muscles in his jaw loosen and his fingers relax. He had been afraid that Cassidy wouldn’t support his story, he realized, stifling the bitter urge to laugh. In the last ten days he had come to doubt himself enough, just enough, to secretly wonder if it was all in his head—the books, the money, the fire, the impostor. Someplace deep inside he had wondered if he was, indeed, crazy. Now he knew he wasn’t.

  He would sell his soul if Teryl could be even half as sure.

  “The state arson investigators were able to identify the type of bomb used,” she went on, her voice flat and unemotional. “They were glass jars, like canning or mayonnaise jars, quart size. They were filled halfway with gasoline, and some sort of filament was suspended over the gas. The jars were sealed and set with timers. When the timers went off, the filaments got hot and the heat ignited the vapors trapped in the jar. That caused the explosions.” Pausing again, she gripped the chair even harder. “He said you had told him that, just before the explosions, you had smelled something inside the house that was familiar and didn’t belong, but you couldn’t place it. He thinks it was the seal. The jars were sealed with modeling clay.”

  Her last words brought him a chuckle. “They say smell is one of our most powerful senses. Just a whiff of a particular scent can take you back years. Play-Doh dinosaurs were my only creations of any note in kindergarten art class. I never got to keep them, though. My mother didn’t allow the stuff in her house because Tom and Janie made messes with it.” He gave a shake of his head. “It’s hard to believe I’ve grown up so much that I didn’t recognize it when I smelled it.” After considering that for a moment longer, he moved on to a more important issue. “You have to believe my house burned down, and you have to believe I told the truth about the bombs because the sheriff told you so. What else do you believe, Teryl? What’s your verdict? Am I responsible for the fire? Did I set the bombs? Or did someone else?”

  Finally she looked at him. Her expression was grave, her eyes shadowed and more than a little concerned. For him? Or herself? “Sheriff Cassidy doesn’t have any doubts.”

  He didn’t give a damn what Cassidy believed… but obviously she did. Because Cassidy was a sheriff, because he was a lawman with years of experience and the authority of the Grant County Sheriff’s Department behind him, she was willing at this point to believe whatever he believed. John hoped before asking that the sheriff’s opinion was good news for him. “And what does he say?”

  Her gaze locked with his as she quietly, somberly replied, “He thinks someone’s trying to kill you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Back in her office, Teryl settled in at her desk to work, but her conversation with the sheriff made concentration impossible. Someone wanted John dead, and the most likely suspect was the man claiming to be Simon. The man who’d done the interview in New Orleans. The man who had given her the willies from the moment they’d met.

  Okay, so the man was self-absorbed. He was the center of his own world and saw no reason why he shouldn’t be the center of everyone else’s, too. He seemed to feel an extremely strong sense of entitlement, as if all the fame, fortune, and adulation were no less than he deserved. There was his intensity, not quite reasonable, not quite normal, and the way he looked at people, measuring them, judging them, exposing them layer by layer with his less than pleasant gaze. Taken one by one, there was nothing wrong with those traits. Even combined, they didn’t automatically add up to murderer potential.

  In Simon, though, maybe they could. Especially if he wasn’t really Simon. If he had become so obsessed with the real Simon Tremont’s work that he had learned to write like him, if he had come up with this outrageous scheme to take over his idol’s life, if he had managed to steal the outline for Resurrection from the real Simon and had somehow written the book… If he was capable of doing all those things, then, yes, he was capable of killing. What was it John had said that day in the storm in South Carolina? The son of a bitch can’t claim to be Simon Tremont if the real Simon Tremont is around to prove him a fraud. In order to continue being Simon, he needed—needs—to get rid of me.

  According to the sheriff, only a week and a half ago, someone had tried to do just that.

  Only a week and a half ago, when Simon had made his changes—the move, the visits, the phone calls—four month
s ago. Why the delay? Once he’d devised his scheme and put it in motion, why had he given the real Simon Tremont four months to possibly destroy everything? How had he known that John wouldn’t contact Rebecca or Candace during that time? How had he known that John wouldn’t turn in his own Resurrection? Why had he put his great elaborate hoax at such risk?

  Maybe it had been arrogance. Maybe he had believed that his plan was so perfect that no one could ever discover the truth. Or maybe it had been the book. Resurrection. He had begun the process of claiming Simon Tremont’s life four months before the manuscript had been completed. Without Resurrection, he could have sustained the lies for a time—long enough to cash a few of Tremont’s checks, maybe long enough to bask in a little of Tremont’s glory—but eventually he would have been compelled to produce something. Without Resurrection, though, his plan eventually would have failed and there would have been little reason to destroy the real Tremont.

  And so he had waited, had worked and written, and only when the book was completed, only when he had proven to himself that he could, indeed, write Tremont’s book, had he turned his attention to Tremont himself. Two weeks ago the manuscript had been turned in to both Rebecca and Morgan-Wilkes. A few days later someone had tried to kill John. Was the timing coincidence? Or part of Simon’s plan?

  Her gaze settled on the space occupied for a few months by her autographed copy of Masters of Ceremony. It was gone, her treasured possession ruined, destroyed in a fit of rage. Sunday, watching John, she had been stunned, unable to fully comprehend what he’d done. This afternoon she couldn’t find it in herself to care much. Even if Simon really was Simon, he wasn’t the man she had idolized all these years, and if he wasn’t really Simon, she certainly wouldn’t want his forgery. She would never want a book signed by a madman who had tried to kill another man all for the sake of his career.

  She sighed wearily. All she’d had for the last week was suspicions and doubts, and they were growing every day. But the focus of those suspicions had changed, the target of the doubts shifted. In the space of a few days, she had gone from labeling John’s claims outrageous and unbelievable to very nearly accepting them. Deep inside there was still a small doubt—there was still the matter of Resurrection, after all—but even that wasn’t hard and fast proof. It was possible—not likely, but remotely possible—that one extremely talented author could thoroughly mimic the style of another extremely talented author. If the first author were dedicated enough. Brilliant enough. Obsessed enough.