Freefall

by RaeAnne Thayne

  The clerk pushed open the door and the dozen or so people in the room fell silent. She saw Maura and Mrs. Cope before her gaze landed on Thomas, standing with Zach near a dignified balding older man she assumed was the judge.

  Her groom wore his Coast Guard dress uniform and the honors and insignias pinned to his chest gleamed under the fluorescent lights. He looked handsome and strong and solid, the most solid thing in her universe suddenly, and she wanted to cling to him until the room stopped spinning.

  He smiled at her, his eyes warm. Somehow just that brief connection helped her find her center. She smiled back and relaxed her fingers on the bouquet.

  "This must be your lovely bride," the judge said. "Shall we get started, then."

  "By all means," Tom said and held out his hand to her.

  * * *

  It was done. They were married—Sophie was his wife.

  His stomach clenched at the word. How far had he come, from a Coast Guard chopper pilot content with his bachelor life to a man with a wife and a ready-made family?

  How could his world change so completely in only a handful of weeks?

  And Sophie. How did she feel about all of this? He couldn't read her at all. She veiled all her emotions behind a bright smile.

  She looked radiant just now across the room as she bent down to say something to the children. She clutched the small spray of flowers he knew came from the Seal Point gardens and they were a vivid splash of color against her pale dress.

  She looked lovely. Demure, in an un-Sophie-like way, but lovely, with all that sensuous hair piled onto her head. She was luminous, vibrant, like a spear of sunlight cutting through the water on a gray day.

  For one crazy second, he wished this was a regular wedding, that they were two people in love preparing to begin their lives' journey together. The fierceness of his desire startled him.

  "She's a beautiful bride," Coleman Philips murmured, following his gaze. "You're a lucky man, Thomas."

  Lucky? He thought about the word. Given their circumstances it shouldn't have fit, but somehow it did.

  He was lucky.

  Sophie was willing to sacrifice everything—a successful career, her home, her wandering lifestyle—to help him care for the three children they both loved.

  "I only wish your father could be here to see his oldest son wed," the judge continued. Thomas heard the compassion in his voice and was grateful for it.

  Coleman Philips was one of his father's few friends who had known about the Alzheimer's since the original diagnosis. Unlike some of the others, he hadn't abandoned William after the disease began to progress. The judge still made regular visits, still spent time playing cards or checkers or just reading the newspaper to him, no matter how incoherent and unmanageable William became.

  "He's had a rough few days. His nurse didn't think it would be a good idea to drag him out."

  Coleman was silent for a few moments, a frown tugging the corners of his wrinkled mouth.

  "You and your bride certainly face some tough challenges," he said finally. "But trust me, you'll find them far more bearable now that you have someone to share them with. A good, solid marriage can be an anchor, a safe harbor, in the stormiest of seas. I hope you find that with your young lady, Thomas."

  Coleman gave his shoulder a compassionate squeeze. For one strange, surreal moment, it was almost as if the judge were a conduit for William, as if his father was indeed there, lending his blessing to the marriage.

  "Thank you," he murmured.

  Before the judge could add anything else, Zach tugged on his pantleg. "This is boring and I'm starving. When can we go home and have something for lunch?"

  Both men laughed at the exaggerated expression on the little boy's features. "Good question," Tom said. "Should we go find your Aunt Sophie and the girls and see if they're ready to go?"

  Zach nodded and slipped his hand in Tom's and he thought again how right those little fingers seemed there.

  Ten minutes later, he ushered them into the waiting limousine and they headed back toward Seal Point.

  He and Sophie still had not shared more than a few words. If not for the chatter of the children, he thought the ride home would have been completed virtually in silence.

  Though he had arranged with the car service for two limousines for the journey to Coleman's office after Mrs. Cope had insisted it was bad luck for him to see his bride before the wedding, he had dismissed one driver so they could all ride together back to Seal Point. Now he and Sophie sat together in the rear-facing seat while the children sat across from them.

  Though she said little, he was intensely conscious of her. The curve of her jaw, the lush, exotic scent that always seemed to cling to her, the subtle, tantalizing press of her knee against his whenever the limousine turned a corner.

  A few times he sensed her looking at him but before he could catch her at it, she would quickly turn back to the children.

  Was she regretting this make-believe marriage, wondering what she'd gotten herself into? He couldn't read anything in the serene cast of her features.

  The rest of the day stretched out ahead of them. If this were an ordinary wedding, they would have been preparing to leave on some exotic romantic honeymoon.

  Somewhere tropical, maybe, with palm trees and brilliant blue water and deserted white sand beaches where they could walk hand-in-hand in the moonlight, where he could steal a kiss or two or twenty while the waves lapped at their bare feet and the warm sea breeze kissed their skin.

  But then, Sophie had been just about everywhere, so no destination he picked would be truly exotic to her.

  Just as well. This wasn't an ordinary wedding. He was going to have to do his best to remember that.

  He didn't realize he had sighed aloud until she looked over at him. "Already having regrets?" she asked in a low voice so the children wouldn't overhear.

  "No. Well, maybe," he admitted. "I was wishing I could take you to some thrilling honeymoon destination, just the two of us."

  She inhaled a quick breath, her green eyes wide, a hint of a blush soaking her cheekbones. "Oh," she murmured. Her gaze locked with his for just a moment and he thought he saw blooming awareness there before she quickly looked away.

  He settled back into the leather seat, in a much better frame of mind after that brief, charged encounter. At least he knew his bride wasn't immune to him. That had to count for something. If they had physical attraction between them, surely deeper emotions could follow.

  He settled back for the remainder of the ride, more heartened than he had been all day.

  His good mood dissipated as soon as the limousine entered the iron gates of Seal Point, when he recognized a dark-blue sedan parked in front of the house.

  "Look, Uncle Tommy. Company!" Zach's neck craned as he peered out the window in an effort to identify the vehicle.

  By the sudden alarm flaring in her eyes, he knew Sophie also recognized the vehicle as belonging to their friendly neighborhood FBI agents.

  Talk about lousy timing.

  "Children, why don't you go to your rooms and change out of your fancy clothes, then find Mrs. Cope and see what she's fixed for lunch," she said when the limousine stopped and the driver opened the doors for them. "After we eat, we'll all do something fun together, I promise."

  "Like what?" Zach asked, the visitors forgotten.

  Tom spoke up. "Since the weather's cleared, we could go horseback riding down at Molera or to the aquarium or we could take a bike ride over to Bird Rock. Whatever you want to do. Talk about it over lunch and we'll see what we can come up with."

  Brimming with possibilities, the children rushed into the house without questioning who might have come to call at Seal Point.

  "I have a bad feeling about this suddenly," Sophie said after the children had disappeared inside. "They must have news."

  "We won't know what until we talk to them. Come on. Let's get this over with."

  When he reached out and grabbed her ha
nd, she sent him a startled, flustered look. After a moment, though, she gripped his fingers tightly—gratefully, he thought—and together they walked into the house.

  Mrs. Cope greeted them at the door, all but wringing her hands. "Those FBI agents are here again. They arrived just a few moments after I returned from the wedding. I tried to tell them this wasn't the best time but they said they would wait. They're in the visitor's salon. I'm so sorry I couldn't seem to persuade them to leave."

  "It's all right, JoAnn," Sophie said. She inhaled a deep breath, then pasted a polite smile on her face, the same one she'd been wearing most of the morning. Together they walked into the room and found Herrera and Washburn seated on the couch, talking softly.

  Herrera looked up at their entrance. Tom watched the FBI agent take in his dress whites, Sophie's demure, flowing dress and their still-interlaced hands.

  She raised an eyebrow. "Your housekeeper was right, obviously. This is a bad time. If we had known we were interrupting a special occasion, we wouldn't have insisted on talking to you both."

  "We were married this morning," he said.

  An expression of surprise flitted across her brown eyes but she quickly veiled it. "I'm sorry we bothered you, then. We can speak with you another time."

  "No," Sophie said quickly. "Please. If you have news, we want to know about it."

  Herrera exchanged a look with her partner. "I don't think you'll find it very pleasant information to deal with on such an important day. We'll come back."

  "If it's bad news, it's not going to matter when you deliver it, now is it?" Tom pointed out. "Today or tomorrow, we still won't like it."

  "Trust me, Mr. Canfield. This isn't something you're going to want to hear about on your wedding day."

  Sudden apprehension nipped at him. He wanted to agree, to tell them to return another time. If it was bad luck to see his bride before the wedding, it surely couldn't bode well to be forced to hear nasty news just after the ceremony.

  "Have you had a break in the case?" Sophie asked.

  Agent Herrera hesitated. "I really believe it would be best if we returned next week."

  "We have spent two weeks with nothing but unanswered questions." Sophie's hand trembled slightly in his. "Please. If you know anything, anything at all, we would like to know."

  Herrera gazed at them both for a moment then sighed heavily. "All right. If you're sure you want to hear this then, yes. There's been a break in the case. Forensics came back from the lab and confirmed the blood we found on Leo Harris's car was a DNA match to Walter Marlowe. When we confronted him with it, Harris finally confessed that he did hit the victim."

  "And?" Thomas prompted.

  After a long pause, the agent went on slowly. "And he claims he was hired to kill Marlowe. That he was only acting on orders."

  "Hired? By whom?"

  She met his gaze without emotion. "Peter Canfield."

  Thomas inhaled sharply. "He implicated my brother? That's ludicrous! What possible reason would Pete have to kill Walter? The man was invaluable to Canfield!"

  "Harris didn't know details. He only said that he had done some other work for your brother in the past, most of it unsavory if not downright illegal. Peter contacted him several weeks ago about taking out Mr. Marlowe and he agreed to carry out the hit for twenty thousand dollars. According to him, your brother paid half before the hit but reneged on the other half after the job was done. That's why Leo had been trying to reach him before the accident that killed Mr. and Mrs. Canfield."

  Sophie's skin had paled. She looked fragile, lost. She slowly disengaged her fingers from his but he was too wrapped up in his own shock to react.

  "So this…this Leo person killed Shelly and Peter because he was angry over money he says Peter owed him?" Sophie asked.

  "He denies that part," Herrera said. "It doesn't make sense, anyway. If he's telling the truth about the Marlowe homicide, why kill Peter, the man he claims was footing the bill for the hit? That's no way to collect on an unpaid debt."

  He couldn't take this in. It was all too huge, too impossible. "He has to be lying. Peter wouldn't arrange to have Walter killed!"

  "We have evidence that he's telling the truth. I'm sorry, Mr. Canfield."

  "What kind of evidence?"

  "Harris still has most of the down payment. It was paid out in cash, hundred dollar bills with consecutive serial numbers that match those in use at Monterey Bank and Trust on a day when Peter Canfield withdrew ten thousand dollars from one of the Canfield escrow accounts."

  "So the numbers match. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe Pete paid him for something completely unrelated!"

  Even as he defended his brother, he thought of the tangled mess Pete had left behind at Canfield. The missing money, the inaccurate records. And the fact that someone—Peter?—had deleted evidence proving Leo Harris had been in contact with him.

  The agents' scenario made a kind of terrible, hideous sense but he just couldn't seem to get his mind around it all.

  "What about Peter and Shelly's crash?" Sophie pressed. "If this Harris person wasn't involved somehow, what caused their car to plummet over the cliff off Highway 1?"

  "We don't know exactly," Herrera hedged.

  "But we do have a theory," Agent Washburn put in.

  Irritation crossed the other agent's features, but she quickly smoothed it away. Still, Thomas had the distinct impression she hadn't wanted the discussion to go in that direction.

  "What theory?" Sophie asked.

  Herrera's mouth formed a tight line. "Mr. Canfield was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash. Given the details of Mr. Harris's story, we believe there is a…possibility he might have acted with intent when he drove into the ocean."

  Thomas was only vaguely aware of Sophie's gasp. This couldn't be real. He rose and paced to the window, his thoughts raging and his insides in knots. The whole thing was surreal, ghastly. A terribly twisted nightmare.

  "You're saying you think Peter dug himself into such a deep hole he couldn't get back out, so he chose the easy way. And took his wife along with him."

  "It's a theory. That's all."

  He glared at Washburn, suddenly angry at his placating tone, at both of them for coming here and springing this on them. On their wedding day, for hell's sake. "I'm not an idiot. Agent Washburn. You wouldn't be here if you didn't have some evidence backing up your theory."

  How could they even consider this? Peter couldn't have been capable of these appalling things, could he? Orchestrating Walter's death, then killing himself and Shelly? It didn't make sense, didn't mesh with what he knew of his brother.

  Though he loved Pete, he had to admit, he hadn't always liked the adult his brother had become. He had watched him grow increasingly self-absorbed as the years passed. Peter could be thoughtless, even cruel, to Shelly and the children at times and barely tolerated William's deteriorating condition.

  Still, despite his brother's flaws, Tom just couldn't reconcile the brainiac kid with the fierce competitive streak who used to follow him around with the man these agents suspected Peter of becoming. Someone who could cold-bloodedly order the hit of Walter—a man who had been like a father to them both—and then plunge to his own death beside the mother of his children.

  He didn't want to believe it, wasn't sure he could ever believe it, no matter what evidence the FBI managed to produce.

  "Are you all right, Ms. Beaumont?" Herrera asked. "Or Mrs. Canfield, I suppose I should say."

  He turned and saw that Sophie had sunk into a chair, her skin pale, bloodless. Her eyes looked haunted, and he thought maybe she was going to be sick.

  Shame washed through him. He was no better than Pete, so wrapped up in his own shock and disbelief that he hadn't spared a thought for Sophie and how the FBI's suspicions would affect her.

  She was his wife and should have been his first priority.

  He hurried to her and rested a hand on her shoulder intending to console her but she flinched away
from the contact.

  Pain shot through him. Of course she wouldn't want comfort from him. He was the brother of the man who may have killed her sister.

  "I'm sorry to give you such hard news, especially today," Candace Herrera said in her no-nonsense voice. "We really should have waited a day or two."

  "You're just doing your job," Sophie said, her voice wiped clean of any emotion. "We understand that. I appreciate you telling us, even though it's difficult to hear."

  "We'll stay in touch when we know more," the agent said.

  "Thank you."

  Tom ushered them to the door, then returned to face his wife.

  Chapter 16

  After they left, Sophie tried to grab hold of her scattered thoughts but all she could focus on was the terror her sister must have experienced as that car plunged in a free-fall over the cliff.

  Oh, Shelly.

  Her stomach churned and the dress that had seemed so loose and flowing and romantic earlier in the day suddenly felt restrictive, strangling the air from her chest.

  She was still sitting there trying to center her breathing when Tom returned from showing the FBI agents out. He looked drawn, exhausted, and her heart squeezed with sympathy for him.

  He sat heavily in the armchair next to her. "Pete wouldn't have killed Shelly," he said after a moment. "He couldn't have. He adored her, Sophie. You have to know that."

  Sophie could think of nothing to say in response, her mind awash in memories of groping hands on her flesh, hot breath in her ear. She was the last person who could defend anything Peter Canfield might have done. She knew exactly what he was capable of doing.

  Tom talked about how much his brother had loved Shelly. She wanted to shout out her denial. What kind of love led a man to act as he had, attacking his wife's sister just a few weeks after the birth of his daughter? That wasn't love or anything like it.

  "It was an accident," Thomas went on, although he sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her. "That's all it could be. Pete might have been selfish sometimes—manipulative, even—but he wasn't a murderer."