Will forced himself to focus on the ledger. The truth, Charlie had said it contained. What truth? What truth could Will discover in an ancient book that would erase the reality he knew to be fact? The reality: his father’s murdered body, Charles Kane’s pistol clutched in his hand; Charles Kane’s disappearance; the missing ledger.
The truth? Charlie McCain was a senile old man if he thought to change Will’s mind with figures in a long-missing book; and if Will allowed himself to be led down this well-worn path of deception, he was a fool. A fool who wanted, desperately wanted, wished, prayed, to find a truth that would absolve Charles Martin Kane of a murder no one else could have committed.
A fool, who loved a woman so much he was tempted to walk out of this room and take it all back. Tell her he’d made a mistake, he’d been wrong, he hadn’t meant it, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that he loved her, he’d forgive, forget…
A fool, who loved a woman so much.
Will glanced at Charlie. Tears glistened in his sky-blue eyes. As though unwilling to expose his vulnerability, Charlie ducked his head, rose quickly, and hobbled to the window. From the distance, he faced the room again.
“I know you’ve hated me a long time, Will. And with good cause. Not for what you think. I didn’t murder your father in cold blood. But I left you fatherless. That, I did.” Charlie ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, drying them.
Will looked away. Charlie continued in a voice earnest enough to sway the most callous jury.
“In a thousand silent ways, I tried to make it up to you, Will. I like to think I was a better father for it. Every time Priscilla scraped her knee or lost a tooth or fell off a horse, I thought of you with no father to pick you up and dust you off. Every time I dried her eyes or rocked her on my knee or kissed away her hurt, I thought of you with no father. Everything I taught her, I wondered who was teaching you. Every time she—”
“Leave Priscilla out of this, Charlie.” The room seemed to sway. The gold names on the ledger swam before Will’s eyes.
“I can’t leave Priscilla out of it. Neither can you.”
Will glared at the old man. “I can if I have to. This is a matter of law and order.”
“Then sit down and read that ledger.”
“We’re wasting time, Charlie. I’ll tell you how we’re going to handle this—”
“No, son, I’ll tell you. Sit down there.” Charlie limped back to the desk as he spoke. Will watched him sit in his worn leather-covered chair. He opened the middle drawer and reached inside, withdrawing a photograph at least as old as the ledger. He passed it to Will.
The photograph was tattered and dog-eared from years of handling. Will’s hand trembled when he recognized the subjects—his father…and Charles Martin Kane. They wore old-fashioned black suits with starched collars and formal ties. Their arms were around each other’s shoulders, their heads were tilted together, and they were laughing. Will’s resolve returned.
“If I needed more proof, Charlie, here it is. You murdered your best friend.”
“Turn it over. Read the back.”
The ink had faded, but his father’s scrawl was still legible—and recognizable.
To Charlie Kane, who’ll always be the better man.
Glad you’re joining the firm, old friend. I need you to keep my nose clean and my ass out of trouble. [Signed] William Penn Radnor III
Will dropped the photograph to the desk. It landed on top of the two Pocket Colts. “What are you trying to say, Charlie?”
“That you’re right. He was my best friend. Like I said, the best friend a man could have. But we were different, Will, as different as daylight and dark.” After a dramatic pause, Charlie added, “As different as you and Miss Priss.”
Moisture stung Will’s eyes. He gritted his teeth so hard he felt his neck muscles quiver. Charles Kane must have been one hell of a lawyer. He knew all the tricks.
Charlie reached for the ledger and flipped pages, leaving it open about halfway through. “Sit down,” he urged again. “This won’t take long.”
Will glared at Charlie. He had prepared for this encounter all his life, so why, how, had he allowed Charlie to get the upper hand? He should have taken charge. He should have—
Against his better judgment, Will sat. On the edge of the seat. With his heart in his throat. He had to get out of here. He had to take Charlie and get out of here.
Charlie handed him a single sheet of paper, a list of figures and dates. “Flip through the ledger. Compare the entries you find in your father’s handwriting with this list.”
Tentatively, as on insect feet, uneasiness crept up Will’s neck. He eyed Charlie, suspicious of the man’s motives, conscious now that the old man he faced was more than a worthy adversary. He was a damned skilled interrogator.
“Go ahead, Will. You owe it to yourself. The truth. After all this time.”
At first glance, the figures in the ledger looked faded; then Will realized his vision was veiled with tears. What was Charlie up to? He squeezed his eyes in an effort to dry them. Charlie pointed to midpage. Will studied the entry.
His father’s handwriting? It was different, slightly, from that above or below. He turned the photograph over and studied the faded handwriting, which moments before had been so familiar. He studied the list Charlie had handed him. The first item matched. The second. The third. Suddenly all Will’s hatred and anger resurfaced. Except it wasn’t the old hatred and anger.
This was a new hatred, a new anger, more potent than the emotions he had lived with for twenty-three years. Will slammed the ledger shut. He jumped to his feet. “How dare you try to muddy the water, Charles Kane? How dare you?”
“I’m not disparaging your father, Will.”
“Disparaging my father?” Will yelled. “My father is dead. You killed him, Charlie.”
“I haven’t denied it.”
Will’s gaze locked with Charlie’s. The room swirled around him in a dizzying rush. He paced to the window, stared out, past the veranda, beyond the barn, to the corral. All was still, quiet, as though nothing outside this room had changed.
And it hadn’t. Nothing had changed for twenty-three years. He’d spent a month caught up in a fantasy, but nothing had changed. He turned on Charlie.
“My mother dried my tears, Charlie. My grandfather dusted me off when I fell off a horse. When you took my father, you took something much more precious away from me.”
Charlie’s face went ashen, and Will advanced. “I was the one who found his body, Charlie. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
Startled, Charlie clasped gnarled hands to his head. “My God, no…”
“I was ten years old, and I wore spanking new shoes, and I was full of hopes and dreams. You stole my dreams, Charlie. You murdered my father, and you destroyed my dreams.”
Charlie sank back in his chair. He picked up the little guns and cradled them, one in each palm.
“My name was going to be on the door of that office, Charlie. Etched in the glass. Oh, it was…it is. But it was supposed to be beside my father’s. My office was supposed to be next to his office. We would see clients together in the same conference room. We would try cases together, we would uphold law and justice together. Together, Charlie.”
Charlie looked up. He stared into Will’s angry eyes. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t try to duck his head or look away. Will grasped the edge of the desk, breathed hard, deep. For a minute that was the only sound in the room, his breathing.
“I loved my father, Charlie. After you took him away from me, I vowed never to love another human being.” He stood there, glaring at Charlie, breathing hard, while sensations as sweet and soft as a summer shower washed over him in wave after wave.
He didn’t see Priscilla’s face. He didn’t feel her body. It was his love for her that swept over him. His enormous, limitless love for her. Tears stung his eyes.
He squinched them shut, hung his head. “Your evil knows no bounds, Charlie
. Now you’re taking her, too.”
A long moment passed before Charlie spoke in quiet tones. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Will stood, head hung, eyes closed, willing his breathing to steady, his mind to clear. He heard Charlie rise, felt the man’s hand on his shoulder.
“Sit down, Will. Let me have my say. You preach law and order, now let’s see you practice it. I have a right to speak my piece.”
Will sat. Truthfully, he had no choice. His legs were so weak, they probably wouldn’t have carried him from the room. And Charlie was right. Even the most hardened killer had a right, under the law, to tell his side of the story.
“Like I said,” Charlie began, “your father and I were about as different as two men can be. I was the serious type, not unlike yourself. Your father was fun-loving. He never met a stranger. Everyone loved him. I envied him that carefree, devil-take-all attitude. He enlivened my life. Enriched my life.” Charlie nodded toward the photograph on the desk. “And like he wrote, I kept him out of trouble. Or tried to.”
Picking up the ledger, Charlie thumbed through it absently. “I won’t bore you with the depth of our friendship. That’s not what you need to hear. The truth is that your father had gotten himself into some serious financial trouble. He liked to gamble and then, I’m not criticizing, Will, but your mother demanded the lifestyle she’d been born to. Your grandfather went along for a while, but well, I’m sure you knew Mr. William for the frugal man he was.”
Will nodded. “Tight. That’s what Mother called him.”
Charlie returned to his chair, drew himself to the desk, and picked up the little pistols again. “I knew your father and grandfather were at odds over money, but as God is my witness, when I confronted your father with what Peters found in this ledger, I didn’t know Mr. William had vowed to cut him off without another red cent.”
Will watched Charlie heft the pistols in his palms, weighing them, lost in thought. Although what Charlie said was news, Will wasn’t surprised. His mother had insisted on keeping a certain lifestyle. That’s why she remarried a year after his father’s death. She’d told Will as much.
“We need the money, Will,” she’d said. “Your Grandfather Radnor doesn’t understand.” So she married a banker.
When Charlie didn’t continue, Will prompted, “You went to my father with these figures?”
“Yes. I had to defend myself. I was in a precarious position. The only person outside the family admitted to the firm. And now the ledger showed I’d received moneys far in excess of what I had earned.”
“Since it was in my father’s handwriting, wouldn’t Grandfather have taken your side?”
“Not likely. You grew up in the family, so you wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be an outsider. I was…expendable. But I had no intention of going to Mr. William. I only wanted your father to find some other way to finance his lifestyle; a way that didn’t implicate me.”
“And my father fired you.”
“Yes. Took me by surprise, I’ll tell you. Here we’d been friends through college, roommates through law school. We’d practiced law together for years. And he fired me. Like I said, I didn’t know how desperate he was.”
“So, the next day you waited until Grandfather left the office; you went back, ostensibly to collect your belongings, and you killed my father.”
Charlie rose, hobbled to the window, and stared out. At length, he turned and resumed the story. “Your father asked me to wait until Mr. William left for the day. When I got to the office, he was waiting. He told me then how desperate he was, that his father had refused him any more financial assistance. That if Mr. William learned about his embezzling, he would kick him out. I tried to convince him that I didn’t intend to tell anyone, but he laughed.”
Charlie’s gaze fixed on the desk, on the pistols. “‘The way you preach law and order,’ your father said, ‘you couldn’t keep this quiet. It’d eat at you and eat at you and one day you would explode.’”
“‘What kind of friend do you think I am?’ I asked,” Charlie said.
“‘You’re the best kind of friend, Charlie. But you’re an officer of the court first. My father’s got you brainwashed.’ We were in my office during this time. I’d brought a carton and was taking down personal things, putting them in the box. When I reached for the pistol case, he stopped me.”
Charlie looked up at Will. “Like you stopped Priscilla…he grabbed my hand. Your father had this wild stare in his eyes. Before I realized what he was doing, he pulled out one of the pistols and pointed it at me. I never kept them loaded, so I didn’t think anything about it.”
Will jumped up. “Are you saying he fired at you?”
Charlie nodded.
“He would have known the guns weren’t loaded.”
Charlie held Will’s troubled gaze, steady, infinitely sad. “He knew they were loaded.”
“You’re saying—”
“Let me finish. Just let me finish. That’s all I ask.” When Will settled back, Charlie continued.
“Instinct saved me. I’d been around guns long enough that even though I thought it was unloaded, I dodged. I’m here to tell you, when that bullet whizzed by my ear it took me by surprise. I lunged across the desk, but your father was out of control by then. He waved the barrel in my direction. I rolled away. He fired again. I reached for the second gun.”
Will’s heart pounded. Self-defense. That’s what Charlie was claiming. Self-defense.
Disbelief swirled through Will’s deep-seated hatred. Disbelief, weakened, he knew, by his love for Priscilla, by his desperate need to find a way to exonerate Charlie McCain.
“I didn’t mean to kill him, Will. If you never believe anything else, I hope to God you can believe that. If not now, at least someday. I didn’t mean to kill him.”
Will sat, silent, stupefied. When he looked up, Charlie had taken his seat again. Like a defense attorney, who had finished presenting his case. Only Will had never seen a defense attorney who looked so defeated.
“If it happened like you say,” Will challenged, “why did you run? Why didn’t you stay and tell the truth?” He motioned to the ledger. “You had proof.”
“Not then. Peters brought the ledger later that night. Later…while you were finding your father’s body, I guess…Peters came to my apartment. He gave me the ledger only after I promised to leave town.”
“Why?”
“Loyalty.”
“Loyalty? You’re talking about a law firm, dedicated to justice for all.”
“This had nothing to do with law firms, Will. Nor with justice. The heir of one of Philadelphia’s ‘royal’ families was dead. No outsider would be allowed to drag his name through the mud.”
“Grandfather wouldn’t…” Will’s words drifted off. Hadn’t he told Priscilla virtually the same thing, minus the royalty?
Charlie turned to the back page and shoved the ledger across the desk toward Will. “Peters left a signed statement…here in the ledger.”
Will scanned the two-sentence statement:
To Whom It May Concern: Charles Martin Kane had no knowledge of nor any part in the embezzlement of Radnor funds. [Signed] Amon R. Peters
It said nothing about the murder, of course. Peters would have had no knowledge of that. But if his father embezzled…
Will indicated the statement. “Why did Peters do this?”
An expression of near hopelessness etched Charlie’s face, aging him before Will’s eyes. “He said I might need it someday.”
Will slumped in his chair. Across from him sat the man he had hated as no human should be forced to hate, a man who represented all that was evil, all that was wrong with the world.
At least, Charlie had represented all that, until a month ago when Will arrived in New Mexico Territory and a golden-haired cowgirl, who dressed like Billy the Kid and smelled like horse sweat, climbed into that stagecoach and changed his life forever.
How could he love Priscilla and
hate her father?
And how could he hate Charlie and expect Priscilla to love him?
Will stared at the open ledger, at the sheet of figures.
“Go ahead, Will. Study them. Decide for yourself.”
Will looked up at Charlie, really looked at him—his ashen, wrinkled skin, his wiry salt and pepper hair, his sky blue eyes. He remembered the night he helped Charlie defend Spanish Creek against the Haskels; he remembered Charlie’s reminiscings. Likely, Charlie had a lot more stories to tell, stories Will was hungry to hear. Neither his grandparents nor his mother had ever spoken freely of his father.
Now he knew why. Anything they recalled about his father, involved Charles Kane, too. Charlie and his father had been inseparable.
Until Charlie killed him.
Will jumped to his feet. He stared at the pistols, at Charlie again.
“Study the figures, Will.”
“I’ve seen enough. Enough to convince me you’re telling the truth about the embezzlement. But you still killed my father, Charlie. And I’ve…I’ve hated you all my life for it.”
“I don’t blame you, son. But now you love Priscilla.”
Will turned away, reluctant for Charlie to see the truth in his eyes.
“Love is stronger than hate, Will.”
Will clenched his fists. He strove to focus on Charlie and his father, on the twenty-three-year-old killing that might or might not have been self-defense.
He closed his eyes and tried to see his father’s body, the blood pooling beneath him, the cluttered office, the pistol clutched in his lifeless hand.
He tried, but the only image he could call forth was of Priscilla. He saw her in the wickiup wearing that soft doeskin shift; he heard the little bells tinkle softly when he ran his hands through her hair.
He saw her beneath him, warm and passionate, while they made love—in the wickiup, in the mountains. Each time he held her, he expected it to be the last. Each time he kissed her he expected it to be the last.
Because each time he was with her, this day, this confrontation, loomed in their future.
Now it was over, but what had he accomplished? What had he learned?
Reluctant Enemies Page 34