by Marta Perry
As it turned out, he didn’t need any of the possible approaches, because the instant Deidre opened the door and looked at him, reproach and pain filling her clear blue eyes, he understood. She already knew.
“Deidre...”
She clutched the door as if to prevent him from entering. “Just tell me one thing. Is it true? Have you been conspiring with the judge to take my son away?”
The words were a blow straight to his heart. “Deidre, you have to let me explain.” He grabbed the door when she would have closed it. “Please. It’s not what you think.”
“No? Do you deny that you were spying on me for Judge Morris?”
“No.” He forced the word out between stiff lips and saw her whiten as if he’d struck her. “But it’s not as simple as that makes it sound. At least give me five minutes to explain. That’s all. Just five minutes. Then I’ll go.”
For an instant she held out against him. Then she took a step back and opened the door. “Five minutes.”
Jase moved inside, buying time by closing the door carefully behind him. He’d presented arguments with a time limit before. Why should this be any different?
Because it matters, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. It matters more than anything you’ve done before in your life.
“Five minutes,” she reminded him. “The clock is ticking.”
“Do we have to stand here in the hallway for this?”
Her face tightened. “You’ve come too far into our lives already. I don’t want you any further. So talk.”
Nothing but the truth would do now. He blew out a breath.
“You know what my situation was before the judge offered me a position. I told you about it. I’d begun to think I’d never work again when he appeared. He offered me a lifeline.”
“With strings attached,” she snapped. “A job in exchange for spying on me, gaining my confidence, making me think...”
She broke off, pressing her lips together, and crossed her arms over her chest in a classic protective posture.
“Not then,” he said quickly. “Not when he offered me the position. He said he was doing it because I’d been a law school colleague of Frank’s, and I believed him.”
She didn’t look as if she felt the same about him. “So when? When did he make you an offer you couldn’t refuse? Or maybe didn’t want to refuse.”
No protestations would do any good right now. “After I accepted the job, he called me a few days later. Said he was worried about his grandson’s well-being. Said that he suspected you of being an unfit mother.”
If possible, she went even paler. “And you believed him.”
“I hadn’t even met you then. And I wasn’t exactly in any shape to believe anything good about any woman.” He spared a brief thought for Leslie, who seemed so unimportant now. “He said that Frank had believed you were being unfaithful to him.”
He saw the blow of that land, saw her reel from it and then grab hold of some core of strength.
“Frank can’t have thought that. If anything...” She stopped. Shook her head. “In any event, you bought it.”
“I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. The man’s a respected judge. He’d just given me a chance when no one else would. And he made it sound so innocuous. Just keep an eye on you and watch for anything that he could use for leverage to get you and Kevin to move into his house. So he could watch over his grandson.”
“And you agreed. You worked your way into my confidence at a time when I was the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in my life.”
That was the crux of it for her, he knew. The idea that he’d used Kevin’s injury to further the judge’s aims. He wanted to take her hands but sensed her precarious grip on her self-control would explode if he touched her.
“If you don’t believe anything else, at least believe this—when I saw Kevin lying there hurt, helping him was the only thing on my mind. Afterward, at the hospital, I talked to the judge. I assumed he’d give the whole thing up then.” He shrugged. “But he didn’t. He made it sound so logical. You would need someone to run interference with the police. And he had to be assured that Kevin’s injury hadn’t come about because of some careless action of yours.”
“Such as having a friend he didn’t approve of.” A spasm of pain crossed her face at the thought of Dixie, but at least she seemed to be listening.
“I guess that’s true, but I didn’t know that. Believe it or not, I did want to help you. Sensing your pain over Kevin, seeing him lie there so vulnerable and helpless—it touched something in me. I think that’s when I started to have doubts. The more I got to know you, the surer I was that he was wrong. You’re a good mother.”
He dared to move a step closer to her...close enough to catch the faint, elusive scent of her. “Deidre, you have to believe me. My feelings for you are real. If you doubt everything else, at least you have to believe that.”
“Do I?” Deidre closed her eyes briefly, and he feared she couldn’t stand to look at him. “If what you say is true, why didn’t you tell me a long time ago?”
Pain clutched his heart. This was the question he didn’t want to answer, even for himself. “I persuaded myself that you needed me, and that if I told you, you’d shut me out. I couldn’t let that happen.”
She just stared at him, waiting.
“Don’t you think I wish I’d told you a dozen times over?” Passion overflowed into his voice. “I just kept lying to myself, when all the time it was me. I couldn’t trust. I couldn’t let go. I had to protect myself.”
He’d been a fool. If he’d told her to begin with, been as honest with her as she was with him, she’d have forgiven him. Now it was too late.
“If you’d told me then...” He saw the muscles of her neck move as she struggled to swallow. “You didn’t. You didn’t just hurt me. You hurt Kevin by letting him grow to love you.” She turned away, as if she didn’t want him to see her face. “Go away, Jason. Don’t come back.”
She couldn’t forgive him. Ever. Deidre was the most honest person he’d ever known, and he hadn’t trusted her enough to be honest in return. He deserved what he got. Whether he still had a job with the judge’s firm or not, it was time he left Echo Falls behind.
* * *
DEIDRE WENT THROUGH the rest of the day on autopilot. She continued to smile and talk, fixed supper, helped Kevin figure out the complexities of printing the alphabet and acted as if nothing was wrong.
But that was all on the surface. Inside...inside she was a wreck. Her heart lay in little pieces, and a nameless dread filled her.
Maybe not so nameless. So much had happened that she still hadn’t absorbed Sylvia’s conviction that the judge intended to get hold of Kevin, no matter what he had to do to achieve that. Each time she tried to think about it, she started to shake.
Enough, she ordered herself. She could be as strong as she had to be where Kevin’s happiness was at stake. The judge was never going to get custody of her son, not if she had to fight him in every court in the land.
Tomorrow she’d contact an attorney—one safely removed from the judge’s sphere of influence. She’d tell him or her the whole story. She’d been a good mother and a faithful wife. No one could possibly prove otherwise.
Faithful. Something started hurting where her heart used to be before it was shattered. Had Frank really believed that she’d been untrue to him? He couldn’t have.
And yet...if he had had an affair with her best friend, who could say what he might have convinced himself of in order to justify his own betrayal?
The questions went around and around in her mind like the horses on a carousel, all while she was putting Kevin to bed, tucking him in, sharing just one more story. It was when she was going back downstairs that something occurred to her.
In all the thin
gs Sylvia had said, there’d been one thing so seemingly unimportant that it had slipped to the back of her mind. When she’d reminisced about the necklace, Sylvia had talked about wearing it for the bar association Christmas gala. But she couldn’t have—at least not this past event. Frank had been gone by then. He couldn’t have given the necklace to Dixie if Sylvia had worn it then.
Sylvia must have meant the previous year. That had to be it. The gala was an annual event, much the same from one year to the next. They seemed to blur together in Deidre’s mind...the same people, the same venue, the same decorations, even the same menu for the most part, unless someone very daring had been on the committee.
Deidre walked around the downstairs, unable to settle. She couldn’t bear to be on the side of the house that looked out toward Jason’s apartment... It was as if she was sensitive even to the building’s nearness.
She started to unload the dishwasher, but the dishes were still too hot. Besides, she felt oddly exposed under the kitchen’s overhead light. In contrast, the darkness outside pressed against the windows.
If Chief Carmichaels was right, there was nothing to be afraid of now. Hanlon had killed Dixie and then been killed himself by the hit-and-run driver who hadn’t yet been identified.
That in itself seemed odd. There wasn’t much traffic down that road. She’d think, when the police had checked the possible vehicles, they’d have come up with something. Or someone would have come forward who’d been on the road at the relevant time.
She still couldn’t quite buy that explanation. Even assuming Hanlon had been the person who’d broken into her house, what had he been after? And why had she sensed someone watching her that day when she’d walked home from Kevin’s school? The same someone who’d been on the porch? Possibly Hanlon, watching for his chance to get in.
It couldn’t have been Billy on the front porch. There hadn’t been time for him to get around the house. Her imagination? A stray dog? The wind?
She could think of a dozen explanations, but none of them satisfied her.
Giving up in the kitchen, Deidre walked back into the living room, flicking the television to a news channel. She wasn’t in the mood for canned laughter, but maybe hearing about the world’s woes would keep her mind off her own.
After a few minutes of floods, tornadoes and unrest, she was ready for anything else. Her gaze fell on the row of photo albums that Dixie had laughed at, teasing her about preserving pictures the old-fashioned way. But if she wanted to browse through a year’s happenings, she’d rather do it in an album than on the computer. Besides, Kevin loved looking through them, especially at the pictures of himself when he was small.
Smaller, as far as she was concerned. He was still a very little boy, though he’d never admit it.
And he was going to be hurt when he realized that Jason had walked out of his life so abruptly. Yet another hurt that she found impossible to fix... Scraped knees were definitely easier than emotional wounds.
Needing to do something, she pulled out the album for the year before last and settled back in her chair with it on her lap. Just to satisfy that little niggling question in her mind, she flipped through to the photos from December. She’d find that was the year that Sylvia had worn her lace dress with the diamond pendant.
But she didn’t. That year, the image of the four of them at the event showed Sylvia in her turquoise silk dress with her pearls. Thoughts roiling, Deidre went back to the shelf and drew out last year’s album. She balanced the two books, turning the pages impatiently until she found photos from the Christmas event.
This time there were just the three of them in the photo. Frank had been gone for months, and she’d felt odd about going to the gala without him. But Sylvia had begged her to go along for moral support—and the image clearly showed Sylvia wearing her lace dress with the diamond pendant.
Deidre set the books down carefully on the ottoman, feeling as if the slightest untoward movement might send her off her balance entirely. Sylvia had the necklace in her possession in December. That meant Frank couldn’t possibly have given it to Dixie.
Laughter and tears fought for supremacy. She’d been wrong. Frank hadn’t been involved with Dixie. She could think of Frank as he had been—a normal, imperfect being who had loved her and loved their son.
She wiped away tears with her fingers. The pain of betrayal was erased from her marriage. Unfortunately, there was no doubt of the betrayal she’d suffered at Jason’s hands.
Deidre wrenched her mind away from that memory, forcing herself to concentrate on the necklace. How had it come into Dixie’s possession? Dixie had been a lot of things, but not a thief. Besides, she’d never, so far as Deidre knew, been inside the house on the hill.
Her thoughts tumbled over each other. And then they froze. She froze, staring at the door. Hearing the familiar click of the key in the lock. Watching as the knob was turned from the outside.
The door opened. Judge Morris stepped quietly inside and just as quietly closed the door behind him.
Deidre could only stare blankly at him as thoughts and ideas jostled with each other and then fell into an inescapable pattern. Frank hadn’t given the necklace to Dixie. The judge had.
* * *
JASON GAZED AROUND the small apartment that had become home during his time in Echo Falls. It was nothing like the upscale apartment he’d had in the city, but he’d been comfortable here.
He felt the urge to start packing, but that wasn’t really practical. Professional etiquette dictated that he should notify the judge that he was leaving before he did anything else. He’d tell him when—but not why, that was certain.
There would be things to clear up at the office, cases to transfer back to Trey, who wouldn’t be happy with this turn of events. Any thoughts of getting in the car and driving as far and as fast as he could would have to be abandoned. He had responsibilities, odd as that seemed.
Would Deidre allow him to say goodbye to Kevin? He doubted it, but at least he could send the boy a card or a note, just to let him know that he’d valued their friendship.
First things first. The judge had to be told, and there was no point in delaying it. He could drive over to the house now and settle the matter. Doing it now had the advantage of allowing him to leave immediately. If he waited to tell him at the office tomorrow, he’d still have to be around most of the day.
He drove through Echo Falls’s quiet streets, still amazed at how tranquil it was after dark. With the shops and businesses closed, people were absorbed in their own activities at home.
At least he’d accomplished one positive thing, to combat all the negativity he’d caused here. From what he’d said last night, the judge had given up his plans to either coerce Deidre into moving in with them or sue for custody of Kevin. Deidre could relax on that score. Somehow that wasn’t as comforting as it should be.
Was he really that selfish that he couldn’t just be happy for her? Or was it a niggling little sense of doubt telling him that Judge Morris would never give up on what he wanted?
Again parking at the curb, Jason strode to the door. He wanted to get this over with, and he could only hope the judge wasn’t going to be difficult about it. He rang the doorbell. Waited. Rang again. Waited some more.
What was going on? Surely the housekeeper would be there, if no one else was. The hall light gleamed through the long, etched glass windows on either side of the double front doors, but he didn’t hear any movement.
Determined not to give up, he put his thumb on the bell and kept it there. Finally, he was rewarded by the sound of hesitant steps on the marble floor. The door opened, and Sylvia Morris peered out uncertainly.
“Is the judge...” He stopped when he got a good look at her face. She’d been weeping, her face red and blotchy with the tears.
She grabbed his arm, shaking it. “You ha
ve to stop him. Please. Stop him.”
He felt her nails digging into his skin and put his hand over hers. “Easy. You’re upset. Can you tell me what’s wrong? Stop who?”
“Franklin. He has to be stopped. I tried, but I can’t. You have to stop him.”
Was this the alcohol talking? He wasn’t sure, but even if it was, that didn’t mean there wasn’t cause to be shaken.
He grasped the woman by the shoulders, resisting the impulse to shake her. “Tell me where the judge is. What is he doing that has to be stopped?”
Sylvia let out another choked sob. “Deidre. He’s gone to Deidre’s. I’ve never seen him like that. He frightened me. You have to help Deidre. I should have, and I didn’t, and now I don’t know what he’s doing.” Her voice rose. “I’m so afraid. Help them.”
His heart had started pumping at the urgency in her manner. “I will. I’m going.” He spun and ran back toward his car.
“Warn her!” Sylvia cried behind him, her voice high and uncontrolled. “Warn her!”
He had to get to Deidre. He accelerated down the street, taking the corner far too fast. It wouldn’t do to be stopped by an accident now. Not when he was filled with a nameless dread for Deidre’s safety.
He went through the traffic light on the corner by the police station. If a patrol car started to follow him, that was fine. He’d lead them right to Deidre’s.
It didn’t make sense. Was he seriously thinking that Deidre was in danger from a pillar of the legal establishment like Judge Franklin Morris? But he was beyond deeming anything impossible at this point. Sylvia’s fear had been infectious. It rode along with him, impelling him faster and faster.
He spun into the driveway at the apartment and ran for the gap in the hedge, leaving the car door hanging open. He was halfway through when his outstretched hand touched something.
No. Someone. In another instant he recognized Billy. He yanked him out of the shelter of the hedge, pulling him into the yard.