by Carly Bishop
Still she argued compassion.
“If you do this, Cy...if you have to be right and someone wrong... if you won’t let me believe you are more than your badge or your honor...more than your precious code, then what is there to believe in?”
He didn’t know. His throat felt thick with tears, his jaw set rigid against crying. He just didn’t know how to make it right or how to transcend himself and his judgment of right and wrong to be the man she could believe in.
On the way to the cemetery, in a limousine with her father, Byron told Amy he had already withdrawn his name from consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the Supreme Court. He had gone this far protecting Pamela Jessup’s right to the life she had carved out of nothing but pain and loss for herself. The only way he knew to get Zach Hollingsworth off her case was to remove himself from the limelight.
He believed the “missing heiress” angle would pall for Hollingsworth after the front-page appeal of a link to him and to his nomination was eliminated.
Seated in the limo beside her father and across from Cy, Amy looked at Cy, as if waiting to see if he would begin to destroy the life her father had sacrificed so much to preserve. Pamela Jessup’s life.
Susan’s life.
After the words were said and done at her uncle’s graveside, Amy took the flowers she had picked one by one for their simplicity from the florist in town and laid them at the base of a memorial marker to her mother.
Amy touched the marble face of her mother’s marker, her wrist doing a small, elegant turn, her third and fourth fingers curled under. Signing I love you, in the language she knew best, to her negligent mother, the only mother she knew.
And in that moment, the shaft of Amy’s arrow, which Cy knew was already lodged in his heart, was split by another, cracking it wide open, leaving room for compassion and justice...and the triumph of love.
When she turned her face to his, what she saw must have betrayed his heart, because she stood up slowly, her eyes never leaving his, and walked into his open arms.
Epilogue
Seventeen hundred miles away, unhappy and snowed in at O’Hare International, Zach Hollingsworth made his TV debut with the hot news of the death of Perry Reeves, and the tip he’d received that Judge Reeves intended to bow out of the nomination to the highest court in the land.
He’d supposed, one day, he’d have to give in to the talking-heads syndrome that had become the journalistic venue of the millennium. He didn’t like it. He was a print man from start to finish. But he was a survivor as well, so he coiffed himself and put on a tie and delivered, like the professional he was.
What he delivered made his gut sour. In his mind, Perry Reeves’s death had put yet another spin on a story more stubbornly guarded than any in recent memory. It suggested to his lean and hungry soul that Julia had been meant to die that night nearly a quarter-century ago, and her preadolescent son doing the deed just didn’t make sense.
And if she had been meant to die, there was a reason. One heavy-duty reason. Zach wasn’t letting this puppy go just because Byron Reeves had given it all up.
The cunning Senator Gould was one happy man. Zach was not.
When the network anchors let him go, he ducked out of the blinding camera lights and tossed aside the mike. He had the neon gauntlet of O’Hare’s concourse tunnel to run. He intended to be on the first plane out, to anywhere between Denver and Salt Lake City.
He was all but free of the camera-heads when one of the interns caught up with him on the down escalator with a cell phone in hand.
“Some woman,” the kid said. “Says she has to speak with you now.”
He took the cell phone. His instincts began to hum. “Hollingsworth.”
“Mr. Hollingsworth, my name is Susan. Years ago, it was Pamela. If you’re interested...if you will come here, I want to tell you my story.”
ISBN : 978-1-4592-5109-0
MCQUAID’S JUSTICE
Copyright © 1999 by Cheryl McGonigle
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario. Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries