After their interview with the psychologist yesterday afternoon, he'd left for Sweetwater. He wouldn't be back until Tuesday, but she would see him Monday. She was driving to the small southeast Tennessee town early that morning to interview Carrie's children. Zachary had made it clear once again that he didn't like the idea—no more than she did, she'd pointed out to him—but it was something that had to be done. He was supposed to arrange it with Carrie's parents this weekend.
She had wanted to make the trip on Sunday, but he had vetoed that. In a town like Sweetwater, Sunday was still a day for families, he reminded her. The Morrises and their grandchildren would spend Sunday morning in church; then they would get together with their other children for a big dinner. Afterward, the kids would play and the adults would talk. There would be no time to discuss business, particularly the sort of business that Beth was interested in.
A year ago, or even six months ago, she would have scoffed at the idea of setting aside an entire day every week just for family get-togethers. She was usually forced to see her family at Christmas, sometimes at Thanksgiving and always on her grandmother's birthday. Three times a year were enough for her.
But somewhere deep inside she felt an unfamiliar twinge that she thought was envy for the Morrises and the Adamses and everyone else who shared that weekly ritual. She envied people who cared enough about their families that they voluntarily spent that much time together. She wondered what it was like to want to see your family.
Muttering darkly, she swiveled her chair so that she faced her desk. She'd been here for an hour already and hadn't even so much as opened the files she'd removed from her bottom drawer. Kicking her shoes off, she settled more comfortably and reached for the top folder.
It contained the summaries of the interviews Zachary had conducted yesterday morning. In comparison with her own atrocious writing, his was graceful and fluid, almost too pretty for a man. So was he, she thought. Not just handsome, but pretty. Pretty face, pretty hair, pretty blue eyes. Pretty enough to distract her from her work.
Wasn't distraction just another word for diversion? she reminded herself dryly. And hadn't she told him just yesterday that a diversion was just what she was looking for? Did that mean that he was what she was looking for?
He hadn't liked that part of the conversation at all. Oh, he hadn't said anything, hadn't told her that she was shallow, shameless, manipulative and cold. But he'd become awfully quiet, and there had been a look of disapproval in his pretty blue eyes.
Not that it mattered, of course. She wasn't going to distract herself with him. She wasn't going to let his feelings, his opinions or his values affect the way she lived. She was simply going to take advantage of his legal skills in order to present the best damn defense possible for Carrie Lewis. Once that had been accomplished, she would probably never see Zachary again except on rare trips to Sweetwater to visit Sarah. Then she would go back to her normal routine.
Her normal, dull, boring, dissatisfying routine.
She sighed, and it seemed to echo around her. This office was big—tangible proof of her value to the firm. Sometimes she felt almost lost in here. Lost and cold, with all the sleek modern lines and cool colors and contemporary art. The only thing in the entire room that belonged to her was the portrait of Great-Grandmother Althea. It was all that she'd brought with her when she came, and it was all that she would take with her when she left.
When she left… She'd never given any thought to leaving the firm. She had joined it straight out of law school and assumed that she would be here until she was too old and her mind too feeble to practice any longer. She had worked hard to make partner, to reach the goal of owning a piece of the firm for herself. She had worked hard for her future.
But what sort of future did she have here? Another thirty years like the last eleven? Giving all her energy, all her concentration, all her passion, to the business of law—and to law practiced in a way that she was coming to dislike more with each passing day?
That was pathetic, Althea would say. Life was meant to be lived, not worked. A person should leave something behind when she died—a family, a home, some accomplishment that would tell those who followed that she had been here. Althea's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were the marks that she had left behind.
Sarah Ryan had her family and the lives she'd touched as an elementary school teacher. Daniel Ryan had his family, too, and his rambling ancestral home and the craft of building fine furniture that had become a business for him. Zachary would leave the children that she knew he would one day have, along with the lifelong friendships he'd formed, the legal services he'd performed for no fee other than satisfaction and the house he was building on his mountain.
What would she leave behind? Her name on a letterhead? Not even that, because whatever ambitious young lawyer eventually took her place in this office would also take her place in the firm's name. Her condo? It hardly held the same impact as a house built with your own hands. Friends? A family of her own? Anyone whose life was better because she had lived?
No. At the rate she was going, all that would survive her would be her money, because she certainly couldn't spend it all before she died. There wouldn't even be anyone to leave it to.
What a legacy.
* * *
Sundays were family days, just as Zachary had told Beth, and he was spending this Sunday with his family and the people who were almost like family to him—Daniel, Sarah and Katie Ryan.
Daniel and Sarah had celebrated their engagement with an impromptu party at Zachary's parents' house, and it seemed that they'd been included in the Adams family ever since. Katie substituted for the grandchild that Bonnie and Josiah Adams were still waiting for, and they filled the empty place in her life left by her own lack of grandparents.
They had long since finished dinner, but they still sat at the table, discussing Sweetwater news—gossip, his grandmother called it—over dirty dishes and leftovers. Naturally Carrie Lewis was the prime topic of conversation, and naturally the bulk of the questions were directed at him, but there was little he could say.
"I don't understand why they're even taking her to trial," his mother remarked as she began gathering dishes from those seated closest to her. "The man should have been killed for what he did."
"Maybe so," Josiah agreed, playfully slapping her hand away as she tried to take his dessert plate. "I'm not finished with that cake yet, Bonnie. Just hold on, will you?" After a moment in which she ignored his admonition, he continued, "Maybe Delbert Lewis deserved to die, but that didn't give Carrie the right to do it."
"Carrie didn't have any rights," Alicia pointed out. "She's a woman, and women's rights in this country are a joke."
"Don't start spouting that feminist nonsense," Josiah warned his daughter. "Women have rights—"
"Just not as many as they should have," Zachary interjected. "When a marriage breaks up in this country, the woman's income decreases significantly. The quality of her life and the lives of her children decreases significantly. But a man's income generally increases, and so does the quality of his life. Responsibility for the children rests almost solely on the mother. Even when the courts order child support, too many men won't pay it, and their ex-wives have very little recourse."
"Why didn't Carrie just leave him?" his grandmother asked.
"Because she had no place to go," Alicia put in. "Because shelters and organizations to assist abused women are grossly underfunded. Because the legislators both in this state and in this country are, for the most part, men who couldn't care less about the problems women face."
Seeing that his father was about to respond, Zachary quickly took his sister's side. "She's right, Dad. Services for women don't count for much when budget time rolls around. If as many men were physically abused as women and children, it would be treated much more seriously by the government." Feeling a tug on his shirtsleeve, he looked down at Katie, sitting in the high chair beside him. "Hey, sweethear
t, you've been so quiet that I almost forgot about you."
She shyly gestured for him to lean closer. When he did, she cupped her hand to his ear and whispered, "Shocolate, please."
Cake crumbs and a messy smear of chocolate frosting covered the high chair tray, her terry bib, her hands, her face and now his shirtsleeve. Dabbing at the stain with his napkin, he asked, "Sarah, can Katie have another piece of cake?"
"Oh, honey, you got Zachary's shirt dirty," Sarah gently admonished.
"Sorry, Sach." Katie made the s's particularly sibilant, then giggled at the sound. "More shocolate now, please?"
At Sarah's nod of approval, Zachary dished a small piece of cake onto Katie's plate.
"Someone never gave her anything sweet until she was more than a year old," Sarah said with a teasing glance at her husband. "Now she's become a perfect little pig for your cake, Mrs. Adams."
Daniel responded to Sarah's teasing with a dry look of his own. "And she's getting as fat as a little pig, too."
Zachary watched them for a moment with a sense of yearning. For a long time he had told himself that it was wrong to be jealous of Daniel. But even though he knew no one deserved happiness as much as his friend, how could he not envy everything Daniel had—especially his sweet little girl and his loving wife—when he wanted those things for himself and saw no hope of finding them in the near future?
Predictably his thoughts went to Beth. Pretty, intelligent, cynical, didn't-believe-in-love Beth. What had she done in the forty-eight hours since he'd seen her? Work was a given; as she'd said herself, she always worked. But what else? Had she spent last night being lazy for the first time all week, maybe curled up on the sofa in front of the television? Or had she gone out on one of her pleasant diversions with some man who only wanted to be seen with one of those Gibsons? And did those dates, those few hours of pleasure, also include sex? Did they end in her bed or his? Did she carelessly give to those men she cared nothing about the precious gift of herself that he would treasure?
Leaving his questions unanswered, he put her out of his mind, but only for a while. Only until Sarah found him in a quiet moment alone after the table was cleared and the leftovers put away until supper.
"How is Beth?"
"Beautiful. Bright. Efficient. Guarded."
"Hmm. That doesn't sound encouraging."
He gave her a rueful grin. "Beth isn't encouraging. But she's a very good lawyer, and I can learn a lot from her, even if I can't get her to agree to dinner or a date." He grew more serious. "She's coming to Sweetwater tomorrow to interview the Lewis kids."
"Tell her to stop by and say hello if she has the time. It's been a long time since I've seen her."
He nodded, then shifted positions, making room for her on the sofa. "Have you ever met her family?"
"Just a few times. Beth looks just like her mother, but that's the extent of the similarities. Francine Gibson is…"
She was thoughtfully quiet for a moment; then she sighed. "Fragile. Easily upset. Weak. She's supposedly very nervous and frail, and that's why she constantly complains and fusses and nags. Personally, I think she's just a terribly unpleasant person."
"And her father?"
Sarah shuddered. "Walter was the man who made me finally realize that maybe growing up without a father wasn't such a bad thing after all. He's aggressive, loud and domineering. He ran Beth's life until she was eighteen, and I imagine he's still trying in one way or another to control her. Apparently he and Francine compete to see who can make life more miserable for the other one."
"And as a kid, Beth got caught in the middle."
"Beth was never a kid," Sarah corrected him with a faint smile. "In your wildest dreams, can you picture her with pigtails and overalls and mud on her face?"
She was right. The image simply wouldn't come. He imagined that Beth as a child must have been a younger, smaller version of the woman she'd become: calm, controlled, well-mannered and wary.
"All in all, she turned out remarkably well, considering her upbringing," Sarah mused. "Her family has financial holdings that would rival the defense budget, and she's always had the best of everything, but she's not the slightest bit snobbish. She was raised in an unstable household where screaming matches and smashing breakables were part of the daily routine, but she's very even-tempered. And although neither her mother nor her aunts or grandmothers ever did a day's work in their lives, she's supported herself ever since law school—which she paid for with student loans, because her father didn't want her to be a lawyer so he refused to pay any of her expenses."
Zachary had been watching Sarah closely while she spoke. When she finished, he quietly asked, "You like her a lot, don't you?" There was a look, a softness, that appeared in her eyes whenever she spoke of someone special to her: Daniel, Katie or Tony. It was there now for Beth.
"She's my best friend," Sarah said simply. "From the time Tony's illness was diagnosed until he died, she was my only friend. I couldn't have gotten through it without her."
From across the room Katie called her mother. Sarah and Zachary both looked up and saw Daniel dressing the wriggly little girl in her coat, hat and mittens. "I guess that means it's time to go," Sarah said, but she didn't rise from the sofa immediately. "Don't be impatient, Zachary. Something worth having is worth waiting and working for. And Beth is definitely worth having."
He walked to the door with her, said goodbye to her and Daniel, and gave Katie a kiss and a hug. Only a few moments after they left, he said his farewells to his parents and grandmother, too, and gave Alicia a big-brotherly hug.
"Why don't you stay for supper, Zachary?" his mother asked. "There's no reason for you to go home so early just to be all by yourself."
"I'm not going home yet. There are a few things I need to take care of at the farm."
"Do you need any help, son?" Josiah offered.
"No thanks, Dad." He needed what his mother had just denied, to be all by himself, but not at home. In his unfinished house.
It was a long drive up Laurel Mountain. Once he moved in, his closest neighbor would be three miles away. To someone used to the bright lights and convenience of the city, this place would probably seem unbearably lonesome, but he loved it here. He was going to love living here.
But he would love it a lot more if someone were living here with him.
He stopped to open the gate that blocked his driveway, then drove through, leaving it open. He wouldn't be here long today. A few hundred feet past the gate he passed the pine he'd cut down yesterday. Next weekend he would start chopping it into firewood. By the time the house was livable, the wood would be well seasoned and would offer many nights of cozy, fragrant fires.
The house itself stood a quarter of a mile up the hill. It was a simple farmhouse, the exterior virtually identical to the house his great-great-grandfather had built down the mountain when he'd first come to this area back in the 1800s. That house was gone now, destroyed by fire before Zachary was born, but photographs of it remained, and he'd used those as a starting point for this one.
Everything was balanced: the double doors exactly centered, the tall windows—three on each side of the doors and seven upstairs—and the twin chimneys, one at each end. The veranda ran the length of the house and, typical of southern homes, was more than ten feet wide, providing shade from the relentless summer sun and shelter from the spring rains. Daniel was making a pair of porch swings, one to hang from each end, to match the two big rockers Zachary had already bought from him.
Zachary walked around to the back of the house. There a tri-level deck with built-in benches took advantage of the best views. In spite of the day's cold, he sat down on one of the benches and stared out across the mountainside.
The little house in town where he'd lived since graduating from law school had never been anything more than a place to sleep and occasionally entertain, but this … this was home. Long before he'd had enough money to start the house, he'd come up here as often as he could to h
ike through the woods. He'd pitched a tent right here where the deck now stood and spent countless nights with nothing but the stars for company. From the time his grandfather had told him that this land would someday be his, he had known that he would live here.
Even if he fell for someone who would find it lonesome.
Even if he someday came to consider it lonesome.
* * *
Chapter 5
« ^ »
Beth parked in front of the building that housed Zachary's office and shut off the engine, then for a moment simply sat there. She was anticipating this meeting more than she should, and she'd been trying for the last twenty miles to put it into proper perspective—unsuccessfully. Since last seeing Zachary on Friday afternoon, she had discovered that, somewhere deep inside, she'd missed him. She, who hadn't been close to anyone but Sarah in the last ten years, had missed Zachary. That was not a good sign.
Sighing, she got out of the car and quickly slipped into her coat, belting it at her waist. It was a nice wool coat that fell to mid-calf, the style simple, the color a conservative gray. It was warm and perfectly suitable for business, but she would have preferred the fur that shared its space in the closet at home. She liked its elegance, and she loved its luxuriance.
Taking her briefcase from the car, she locked the doors, then went inside. There were two doors opening off the broad hallway: wide, double glass doors that led into the bank and a single oak door with frosted glass that read Zachary Adams, Attorney. There were no hours listed and no lights shining within, and a twist of the doorknob revealed that it was locked. A glance across the hall showed that the bank was closed, too.
Small towns, she thought. At home she would have been in her office for at least an hour by now, her day well underway. But not Zachary.
She might as well find a cup of coffee, she decided, returning to the sidewalk outside. She had passed a small restaurant a few blocks away. Switching her briefcase to her other hand, she started in that direction.
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