“That must have been when he took the key,” Emma said. Standing behind her mother, her hands resting lightly on Rose’s shoulders, she looked at Miller. “He knew where it was.”
“I assumed so. You ladies let him into your lives. Trusted him. He has a lot to answer for.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no.” Rose was trembling. “I left the room and he took the key and… I put you in danger, Em. I can’t believe it. I put you in danger. I’m so sorry. I—”
“As you can see, your daughter’s fine, Mrs. Sanderson,” Detective Miller said in a voice Emma hadn’t heard before. “You taught her to take care of herself well.”
“You saved yourself, Em?”
From Rob? Yeah, she’d found a way to get out of giving in to his demands. But she’d have ended up a murderer if not for…
“Yeah,” she said now. If she’d hurt Rob, killed him, it would have been self-defense. She knew that. But earthly laws didn’t make her feel as though taking a life was okay.
“She outsmarted him,” Miller said, and Emma gave him a warning look.
Rose stared and Emma forced herself to erase any trace of the past few hours from her face.
“You’re really fine?” Rose asked.
“Yes, Mom, I’m fine.” Rob was in custody. Chris was gone. And she wasn’t concerned about being pregnant. Claire was still missing, there were no further answers in her case, but that was normal for them.
“Where’s Rob?”
“In jail,” Detective Miller said. “Where I hope he’s going to be for a very long time.”
“Even though he didn’t hurt her?”
“He was in her house when she got home tonight. He held her there against her will, which is considered kidnapping. He threatened bodily harm and he attempted to blackmail her. All serious felonies punishable by twenty years or more in prison.”
If they could prove any of it, Emma thought. She was sure Rob would try to turn it into a case of her word against his. Rose said he could take the key. Emma said he was welcome to his discs. Both statements were true, but in a different time and under different circumstances.
Which they had no way to prove.
And between Rob and Chris? Chris was the one with the gun when the officers burst into the room. And he’d refused to relinquish it at first.
Hopefully the Cheryl Diamond thing was going to pan out.
Or they’d find out what Rob was really up to before it was too late.
* * *
“YOU’RE GOING TO come clean with me.” Ramsey Miller stood over Evert, who was sitting, hands cuffed in his lap, at a table in the interrogation room Tuesday night.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He tossed a picture of Cheryl Diamond in front of the man. “She gave you up, man. She’s talking. Now’s your chance to have your say before we agree to the deal she’s asking for.”
“I’ve never seen that girl before in my life. If she thinks she has something on me, I’m willing to take my chances.”
“You’re already going away for a long time, you get that, don’t you?”
“For what? Defending myself from my ex-fiancée’s jealous lover? You heard your guys. When they burst in, Talbot had a gun on me.”
“Uh-huh, and you just happened to stop by for…what? A friendly chat?”
“I came by to get some discs I forgot in Emma’s office. I needed them for work. She’s given me a key.”
Evert was not changing his story. At all.
Because it was well rehearsed? Or the truth?
“What about Rose Sanderson?”
“What about her? Last I saw her, she was fine.”
“You admit to seeing her, then?”
“I did see her, briefly, yes. This afternoon. I stopped by her place to see if she could help me iron things out with Emma. We talked for a few minutes, and when I could see she wasn’t going to be much help, I asked her if she minded if I look for the discs that I later found at Emma’s. She looked for me, said she didn’t have them, and when she said she thought it was best that I leave, I did. I’m sure she’ll verify that.”
“Emma says that you claimed to have forced Rose to call the organizers of the conference she was supposed to attend and say she wasn’t coming.”
“Emma says a lot of things that aren’t exactly true, but that’s a stretch, even for her. All those years, growing up with a mother like hers, always having to look over her shoulder, never trusting anyone, being afraid, it’s all taken its toll on her.”
The lowlife was twisting the truth into lies, but Miller wasn’t done with him yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EMMA WAS AT HER doctor’s as soon as the office opened Wednesday morning. She was only five minutes from school and had plenty of time before she had to be in her classroom. She’d learned a long time ago that the best way to survive tragedy was to go on. To find normal again.
“The doctor’s not here yet, but we can get the blood work done so the results will be ready when she arrives,” the receptionist, a new woman she’d never met before, told her. “Because you’re one of our patients, the test is free of charge.”
She already knew that, and couldn’t care less about the money. Not that she bothered explaining either point to the poor woman behind the desk. It wasn’t her fault the mere thought of Chris Talbot—the man who hadn’t called her at all last night, hadn’t picked up when she’d called him—made her tense enough to snap.
“My appointment with the doctor isn’t until four-thirty, but she’d suggested that I get the lab work done this morning,” she told the receptionist, forcing herself to smile in hopes that the expression somehow translated into her voice.
“Of course.” The woman called for Christine, a nurse that Emma knew by sight, and the whole thing was over in a matter of minutes.
By five o’clock that afternoon, she’d be free of her last tie with Chris Talbot. She hoped. And then felt like crying again.
Minutes later, Emma pulled into the teacher’s parking lot at school, found a space and picked up her phone, calling up the notepad feature.
Detective Miller had suggested that she should take the day off work. Maybe see a counselor. He’d offered to set her up with one.
After all, she’d been involved in an attempted murder the night before.
Chris’s. Miller didn’t know Emma had tried to turn the gun on Rob, instead.
He also didn’t get that her job was what kept her sane. Not counseling. She’d had enough of that over the years.
She’d go into school. She’d do her job.
And then she’d do the last thing she was ever going to do for Chris Talbot.
She would set him free.
But first, she had another journal entry to make.
5. I want to have children.
* * *
AS SOON AS he secured the Son Catcher for the night and sold his day’s take to Manny, Chris left the docks. He went home, showered, put on fresh jeans, a black T-shirt and flip-flops, ran a comb through the wet hair tipping his shoulders and went straight back out to the truck.
It wasn’t Friday. And it wasn’t even dinnertime yet, but he pulled up outside of Marta and Jim’s place and went to the door.
“Chris?” Marta had a worried smile on her face when she met him at the door. “Come in,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
> “Jim’s okay?”
“I haven’t seen him today, Aunt Marta, but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary going on down at the docks. Did you expect him back early?”
“No.” The older woman’s grin lit up her face. “I just…seeing you there, I thought—” She sat down in her rocker. “No matter how many years pass, I guess you never quite get past the fear of…well, never mind.”
He understood. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”
“No, it’s fine. I just let my imagination get away with me sometimes. So, tell me what’s up.”
He didn’t pretend this was just a social call. If he’d made more of them in the past ten years, maybe he could get away with it. But what was the point?
“I need to talk to you, Aunt Marta. Have you got a minute?”
“Just put the casserole in the oven. I’ve got forty-five minutes before it’s due to come out.”
“I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“I don’t lie to you, son. I never have.”
“I’m not accusing you of lying. I’m just saying I need the complete truth.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Good. Then tell me about my mother.”
“I knew Josie most of her life. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know the things you don’t talk about. The things you’ve never told me.”
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, Chris. You know it’s not right.”
“I’m asking you to tell me the truth about my mother,” he said again. “Besides the panic attacks. I think I have a right to know.”
“Your mother was a good woman, Chris. She adored you and she adored your father.”
He had cause to doubt her on both counts. Looking out at the ocean in the distance, he held his tongue. There was a right way and a wrong way. A phrase he’d heard his father say a million times.
“She…had problems.”
An understatement. “She had men, you mean.”
“You knew?”
“She didn’t tell you about the day her twelve-year-old son walked in to find her naked in bed with a man he’d never seen before?”
Marta’s head bowed. “No.” Her eyes, when she looked back at Chris, were shadowed. “Chris, I didn’t condone what your mother did.”
“But you knew about it.”
“Yes.”
“You knew that she was being unfaithful to my father and yet, all those years, all those Friday nights, we’d sit here together like family and you never once told my father what you knew?”
“First, it wasn’t my place to tell him about it.”
“You and Jim were his best friends!” Chris stopped as his voice raised. “Who else should have told him something like that?”
“And secondly,” Marta continued as though Chris hadn’t spoken, “he didn’t need to be told. He knew.”
“Later, yeah, he found out somehow. But if he’d known from the beginning—”
“He knew fairly early on in their marriage.”
The time when he was twelve wasn’t the first? “You’re sure about that?”
Marta nodded. “He talked to Jim about it.”
“He did.”
“He was heartbroken, of course, but he still loved your mother. And she loved him. She hated what she was as much as anyone. She begged your father, time and again, to forgive her, to not leave her.”
“He should have left her.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not for us to say. Their relationship was between the two of them and who knows what was best for them.”
Chris shook his head.
“Your mother grew up in a different time,” Marta said. “You never knew her parents, but they were quite wealthy. Her father was a strict man who expected his wife and daughter to know their place and not to stray from it. In exchange they were pampered and spoiled and protected. There wasn’t much money left by the time your grandmother died, but your maternal grandparents gave your house to your mom and dad as a wedding gift. Your mom loved being the boss of her own home, but she never learned how to be self-sufficient, how to rely on herself for anything. And each time she’d have a panic attack, she’d think she was going to die. She’d do anything to stop from having them. Being with…someone…stopped them.”
Funny, for a woman who couldn’t take care of herself, she’d certainly taught him how to.
“She was weak, Chris. She needed a man around to feel safe. And she fell in love with a man who couldn’t be around.”
She fell in love with the wrong man.
“I don’t think she knew, when she first married your father, quite how isolated her life was going to be in that beautiful cottage on the hill. Her father had just died of a heart attack and her mother had remarried and moved to Europe, and your dad had been great with her through all of that. She was so in love with him. She found him exciting and different from anything she’d ever known. Where her father stifled her, your father gave her freedom. It seemed as though they were great for each other.
“It didn’t hit her how completely alone she was until she went into labor with you. Your dad was out to sea and there was no way to reach him. She was in so much pain and petrified. You came very quickly and she hemorrhaged, and she had to face that all alone.”
It was the challenging times in life that shaped you, that provided you with the opportunities to make the choices that defined who you were. More sage words from his father.
“By the time your father got there, it was all over, but she didn’t ever seem to get past that feeling of being alone and helpless. She started to obsess about your father being gone, about something happening while he was out at sea. Her father had taught her that she couldn’t do things on her own.”
Chris didn’t want to understand. It was easier to blame her.
“Your dad didn’t take a single day off when you were born, or at any other time, either. When you had colic, had your tonsils out, played your first T-ball game. The sea beckoned to him, just like it does Jim and you and Trick and the others. He had a family to support and the ocean was his sole provider.”
She didn’t have to explain that part to him.
“He wasn’t there for many of the important moments, Chris. He missed not only your first steps and first words, but the time you fell and hit your head and had to have stitches…the time you had rheumatic fever.…”
Marta’s voice trailed off, but Chris didn’t need her to remind him of all the times he’d needed his old man and hadn’t had him there. He knew better than Marta all the things his father had missed. Baseball games. Science projects. Father-son campouts.
“I used to think that your father stayed because of you. He wanted to raise you. He worried about what kind of life you’d have if your mother took you to live with her someplace else.”
“With her whoring around, he could have sued for custody.”
“You were a baby, Chris. Back then, they didn’t take babies from their mothers. Besides, she was a good mother. A really good mother. She put you first in everything she did. No one could doubt how much she loved you.”
A flash of memory surfaced. His mother, beautiful in a dress that came in at the waist and then flowed out around her, was smiling at him. He wasn’t sure why. He’d loved her so much. The memory faded.
“Later, I understood that your father stayed with her because he loved her too much to let her go. And because she loved him. It’s hard to
understand. Lord knows I spent years trying. I was the one she’d come to after she’d been with another man. She’d cry so hard I thought her ribs would break. She hated herself. For a time, she talked about suicide. I went with her to counseling. But nothing was stronger than her need to feel safe. Secure. Cared for. Her affairs were short-lived. Far between. And discreet. Your father made up his mind that they weren’t worth losing her over.”
“Until she decided to divorce him.”
“She was older then. More mature. She’d accepted who she was. You were grown and out on the water, too. It was obvious you’d chosen to follow your father’s way of life. And she couldn’t face growing old alone. She’d gotten to the point where she dreaded getting up every morning to face another day. She was afraid something would happen to her and no one would know. She was forgetting things and was afraid she’d lose her mind. She asked your father to turn the boat over to you and give her the rest of his life, but he couldn’t do it. He came over here. Talked to Jim about it at length, but he just couldn’t leave the sea. He knew he’d be no good for either of them.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’d have gone through with the divorce.” Marta started to rock, staring out at the water that ruled all of their lives. “She loved him too much.”
A love story doomed from the beginning.
“She didn’t lie to him.” He let the revelation sink in. Those times he’d known his father had known, the times his father had come home and treated his mother as though nothing was amiss—his father hadn’t been living with a lie, he’d just been living with an unfaithful spouse.
An openly unfaithful spouse.
“No, Chris. Your mother never lied to your father. She didn’t hide things from him, either. The very first time she was with another man, she told your father right away. She was so ashamed.”
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