The Midnight Hour

by Karen Robards

  “Oh, God, Donny, he killed your mother. . ..”

  “He’s sick, Dad. He couldn’t have been in his right mind.”

  A nurse hurried down the hall and said something in a low voice to the doctor.

  “He’s conscious and asking for you, Mr. Sherman,” the doctor said.

  Mr. Sherman shook his head. “I can’t talk to him.”

  “Dad”—Donny’s voice was urgent—“we can’t just abandon him. He needs us now more than ever.”

  Mr. Sherman looked at Donny and shook his head again. “You were always a good brother to him. This isn’t your fault. You’re the best son a man could have.”

  “Dad, please . . .”

  “All right. All right. For you.” He nodded at the doctor, and then, in response to a gesture from the nurse, father and son followed her down the hall.

  Grace, fascinated, followed too.

  For what seemed like an eternity she hovered in the hallway outside the room they were shown into, but in reality it could have been no more than twenty minutes. The occasional passing nurse cast her a curious glance, but no one bothered her. When Mr. Sherman and his son emerged at last, she was studying the room charts posted on a bulletin board just down the hall and trying not to hope for the impossible. The physical resemblance might be just a fluke. . ..

  “Mr. Sherman.” Grace walked up to the father before she lost her nerve. He looked shaken, she saw, while the son was white as a ghost. “I’m Grace Hart. Judge Grace Hart. The boy in there—that is, my house is where—where he broke in. Where they found your wife.” She took a deep breath. Donny’s eyes, she saw, were blue. And his nose was long, with a bump in the middle of the bridge. She tore her gaze from his face. “I’m—I’m very sorry,” she finished lamely.

  For a long moment the three of them simply stared at one another. Grace’s heart was racing. She felt almost sick with hope.

  “It is I who must apologize to you,” Mr. Sherman said heavily. “Matt—my son in there—tried to kill you and your daughter. I don’t know what to say.”

  “He did it because he was jealous of me,” Donny said in a stunned tone. “He said so.”

  Mr. Sherman grimaced as though in pain, then looked at Grace directly.

  “I believe you must be the biological mother of my son,” he said.

  Grace almost gasped. To have the truth that she had striven so long to hide spoken aloud so matter-of-factly was—unsettling. But the question remained—which son?

  Donny was staring at her. Her gaze met his, and it was all she could do to pull it away to focus on his father.

  “If—is—I was under the impression that it was my son who attacked my daughter and me,” Grace could not bring herself to ask the question directly.

  Mr. Sherman shook his head. “To my never-ending sorrow, Matt is my biological son. My wife and I had decided not to have children, because of . . . of certain psychiatric problems on her side of the family that we feared might be passed on genetically. We adopted Donny here as an infant, and a year later Sylvie accidentally got pregnant with Matt.” He let out his breath in a short, bitter sigh. “She thought it would be nice for Donny to have a younger sibling. When she found out the second child was a boy, she was ecstatic. She wanted Donny to have a little brother.”

  Grace barely heard the last few sentences. She stared into the eyes of her son. For a moment she could not speak. He appeared to be similarly affected, because he in turn stared in silence at her.

  “Hello, Donny,” she managed after a moment.

  He said nothing, and Grace braced herself to be snubbed. But then he held out his hand. “I . . . don’t know what to call you,” he said.

  “Grace,” Grace said swiftly, taking his hand. Mom was too intimate and, for a child, could belong to only one person in the world. Donny’s mom was dead, under dreadful circumstances that very day, and he must be heartsick with horror and grief. But Grace was his mother, and he was her son, and he was alive and well and she was holding his hand.

  “Grace,” he said.

  One of the hardest things she had ever had to do was let his hand drop. But she did it.

  Dominick and Jessica appeared around a bend in the hallway and came toward them.

  “This is my daughter,” Grace said when they reached her. “Jessica.”

  The physical resemblance between Jessica and Donny was striking. Even Jessica noticed it, blinking at the young man in apparent confusion.

  “Hi, Jessica,” Donny said, and Grace realized that his adoptive parents—no, his parents—had taught him excellent manners. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “This . . . this is . . .”—Grace almost said your brother, but again, that suggested a relationship beyond the biological tie that connected the two. She didn’t want to take anything for granted, or seem to go too far, too fast—“the baby I was telling you about. The one I gave up for adoption nineteen years ago.”

  “My brother?” Jessica gasped. Grace almost had to smile. Trust Jess to get to the heart of the matter. She glanced at Grace. “You mean—the guy who broke in wasn’t? . . .”

  As Jessica broke off, apparently afflicted with belated delicacy, Grace shook her head.

  “Thank goodness,” Jessica said devoutly. It was all Grace could do not to clap a hand over her daughter’s irrepressible mouth.

  “Mr. Sherman,” Dominick said, interrupting the awkward moment, and offering a hand first to Mr. Sherman and then to Donny, “I’m Detective Dominick Marino, Franklin County Police. First, let me express my condolences on the loss of your wife. I know that this is a very difficult time for you and your son.” His glance flicked to Donny and back. “I understand that you were able to talk to your other son. Did he tell you what prompted his actions? Why he killed your wife?”

  Mr. Sherman cleared his throat. “Donny, why don’t you take this young lady here—Jessica?—for a little walk up the hall, okay?” He waited while Donny, frowning but obedient, did as he was asked. The two moved out of earshot, but remained visible just up the hall. Mr. Sherman looked from Dominick to Grace and back. “There’s no need for him to hear all this. Matt did . . . talk about that. He and my wife never got along, never. They were . . . alike in every way, too much so. Matt said he was jealous of Donny, because he thought my wife and I loved Donny better than him. He meant to kill my wife and me, and Judge Hart and her daughter, and blame it on Donny, whom he also meant to kill after making him write a note confessing to the crime. Apparently he planted some evidence at your house”—he glanced at Grace—“implicating Donny. And he meant to plant more. He was wearing Donny’s shoes, so the footprints would be consistent with Donny’s, and meant to leave a glass Donny had drunk from and some of Donny’s hair and a few other things like that at the scene of the crime.”

  “Oh, my God! The gum!” Grace gasped. When Dominick and Mr. Sherman looked at her with incomprehension, she waved their inquiring looks aside. “Never mind. Tony knows.”

  “There is one other thing,” Mr. Sherman said grimly. “And this is the part I didn’t want Donny to hear. He was in the rest room when his brother told me, thank God.” He took a deep breath. “Apparently Matt also killed Donny’s girlfriend, who disappeared from her house last weekend. Her name is—was—Caroline Staples. You’ll find her body in a freezer in the basement at 327 Maple in Upper Arlington.”

  Chapter

  51

  A WEEK LATER, Tony was released from the hospital. It was about 5:30 P.M., and Grace had swung by to pick him up after work. Jessica had basketball practice until six, and after that she was spending the night with Emily Millhollen.

  So they had the whole night alone. Unfortunately, Grace thought, Tony was still too weak to make it worth their while.

  His head was covered by a wrap-around white bandage that looked, Grace told him, like a turban. Beneath it was a hairline skull fracture and two deep cuts, one requiring twenty stitches and the other thirteen. He had two broken ribs, which were taped, and huge,
intermittent bruises from the top of his head to his ankle on the right side of his body.

  His face, which had been swollen to the size of a basketball the day after the beating, now looked fairly normal, if one discounted the gash on his right cheekbone, which had required six stitches, and a blackened right eye that was now fading toward normal in shades of purple and yellow.

  “So you’re having lunch with Donny next Wednesday?” Tony inquired. He was leaning back in the passenger seat of her gray Volvo, looking perfectly content.

  “Yes. He called me.” Grace beamed at him with transparent delight. “He said he wants to get to know Jessica and me.”

  “Things have a way of working out, don’t they?”

  “I feel like this enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders. He’s a nice boy, Tony.”

  “He seems to be. Wait, you’re missing the turn!”

  They were heading toward his house so he could pick up some things, as he would be staying with Grace and Jessica until he was completely recovered. Grace whipped the car down the street Tony indicated, and grinned as Tony hung onto the armrest with an alarmed expression.

  “Chicken,” she teased when the maneuver was completed.

  “Are you ever going to let me drive?”

  She pretended to consider. “Probably not.”

  He shrugged. “Just asking.”

  Grace pulled up in front of his house.

  “You sure you don’t want to wait in the car while I go in and pack you a bag?” she asked anxiously, turning to look at him.

  “I may not be up to full strength, but I think I can manage to walk in the house,” he said, his voice dry.

  “Fine.” Grace got out of the car, and so, more laboriously, did Tony. Dusk was falling, and Grace watched the streetlights flicker on in the alley behind his house. Here on the street, long purple shadows stretched across the leaf-strewn lawns as the last remnants of daylight faded away.

  Tony stood beside the car, one arm resting on its top, and Grace hurried unobtrusively to his side. Wrapping his arm around her waist, he permitted her to help him up the walk.

  “Hey, there, Tony! You feelin’ better?” From her front window, Mrs. Crutcher must have seen them pull up, because she came hurrying out onto the porch.

  “Yeah, Mrs. Crutcher, thanks.”

  “What about your dog, what was his name? Is he doin’ okay?”

  “Kramer, Mrs. Crutcher. She gets out of the hospital on Monday.”

  “His bill’ll probably be as big as yours,” Mrs. Crutcher chortled.

  “Yeah, probably.” Tony didn’t sound quite as amused.

  “Well, you folks take care.”

  “You too, Mrs. Crutcher. Good night.”

  “ ’Night.”

  They had reached the stoop now. Grace took Tony’s key from his hand and opened the door. The old woman was still watching as they went inside.

  “You’ll never have a stalker,” Grace said with certainty, reaching to turn on the light. “I don’t think anyone could get past Mrs. Crutcher.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be the one to try,” Tony agreed. His hand caught Grace’s, keeping it from reaching the switch.

  “Tony . . .” she protested.

  “Grace,” he said, gently mocking, then bent his head to kiss her mouth.

  To all her protests that he couldn’t, he replied that he could, and demonstrated it, too. True, he wasn’t up to a lot more than just lying on his back in the middle of the bed, but that proved perfectly satisfactory to them both. She undressed him, and herself, and then amused herself by teasing him until he was groaning, and she suddenly didn’t find the activity quite so amusing any more. He had lots of injured parts she tried to be careful of, but in the end the passion that flared between them was so hot and fierce that she forgot all about his damaged state, and rode him until the world exploded. Then she collapsed on top of him, gasping and replete.

  At that he groaned, in a different timbre from the lewd noises he’d been making just moments before, and winced palpably. Recalled to a sense of his disabilities, she immediately rolled off him.

  “Oh, Tony, I’m sorry!” She reached for the bedside lamp. Switching it on, she looked at him contritely. “Are you all right?”

  “I think you broke my few remaining whole ribs and . . .” he said, then started laughing at the horrified look on her face. “I’m fine. You just came down on a tender spot, is all.”

  “We shouldn’t have . . .” she began, conscience-stricken.

  “Yes, we should have. In fact, if you give me a minute, we’re probably going to do it again. And again. And . . .”

  “Oh no we’re not.” Grace rolled off the bed, and stood, arms akimbo, looking down at him severely. He was still her handsome Tony, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, and long of leg, but the white bandage circling his head and rib cage, plus the massive contusions that marred almost his whole right side, made him look like a refugee from a horror movie. “If you could see yourself . . . You need to rest.”

  His eyes moved over her, their quick heating reminding her that she was naked. He reached out, caught her hand, and tugged.

  “Tony, no.”

  “Just come and he down here beside me for a minute. I won’t do anything, I swear.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “There’s that paranoid nature of yours again.”

  “I am not paranoid.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  He tugged at her hand once more, and despite her protests, she allowed herself to be persuaded to stretch out beside him, on his uninjured side, her head on his shoulder, her hand resting just above the layers of white bandage that circled his rib cage. And then he proved, very thoroughly and once and for all, that she did not have a paranoid nature, that every suspicion she had ever harbored in her life had, in fact, been well-founded, including the one about his true intentions when he had coaxed her down on the bed.

  She would have told him so, too, and very pithily, except when she finally caught her breath enough to yell at him, he distracted her by the simple but uncharacteristic gesture of raising her hand to his mouth, and kissing the back of it.

  “I love you,” he said then, looking deep into her eyes. “Marry me?”

  To shorten what in reality proved to be a very long and physically tiring answer, she said yes.

  It must have been around midnight before they were ready to go. Grace insisted on carrying his duffel bag out to the car, and Tony let her, number one because his ribs were really hurting like hell—not that he meant to admit as much to Grace—and number two because he needed just a minute or two alone.

  He was moving on in his life now, putting the past behind him, and he felt just the smallest twinge of guilt about that. He would love Rachel forever. She would be a part of him for as long as he lived, but he knew now that he could be happy again, that life still held sweetness for him, like surprise packages just waiting to be found and unwrapped along the road.

  Her picture was already stowed in the duffel bag, so he did the next best thing and walked out into the warm, breezy night to say good-bye to Rachel in her garden. Off behind the garage, the gauzy yellow light of the street lamp was swarming with bugs as it illuminated the alley. Overhead, a pale quarter moon rode high in the sky, surrounded by dozens of tiny stars that glittered like diamond chips on a field of midnight blue. Closer at hand, the grass and fallen leaves beneath his feet looked almost black. A faint scent wafted through the air.

  Roses?

  Tony frowned, and then his eyes widened as he stared at Rachel’s rose garden. Unless he had completely lost his mind, it was in bloom, in full, glorious bloom, each bush lush with large white blossoms that released their perfume into the night.

  In four years, those bushes had not sprouted so much as a bud. And it was late October yet. Warm still, admittedly; Indian summer, yes; but—roses in October?

  Tony was not convinced until he was close enough to reach out
a hand and touch a velvety flower.

  Roses. In October.

  Tony stood there transfixed, staring at Rachel’s roses, in full bloom now where, only a week before, there had been nothing more than a circular patch of leathery, almost leafless branches and thorns.

  A white moth came straight at him, swooping out of the darkness seemingly from nowhere, and he ducked away instinctively as its soft wings brushed his cheek.

  It felt almost like a caress.

  A horn honked from the street. Grace. He had to bring her back here, to show her—no.

  If he showed her, maybe she would tell him that she’d had the rosebushes replaced. Maybe she knew why the bushes were blooming, and there was nothing mysterious about it at all. She’d had them fertilized maybe, and watered. Something.

  If that was the case, he didn’t want to know.

  This he was going to take as a sign of benediction from the daughter he would love until he died.

  Very gently, he plucked a single bloom, inhaling the sweet fragrance before placing it in the pocket of the leather bomber jacket he wore. He would press it in a book when he got home.

  He smiled faintly to think that Grace’s house was now home.

  The horn sounded again.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said aloud, to no one in particular.

  Then he turned and headed toward the street where Grace waited behind the wheel of her Volvo. Jessica would be home tomorrow, and the thought made Tony feel oddly complete.

  His life had come full circle, he thought. He was going home to his girls.

  In the darkness behind the house, a small white moth hurtled joyfully upward, this time racing without regrets toward the light.

  Karen Robards is the author of twenty-three books. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, their three sons, and a sizable menagerie.

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.