by Diana Palmer
She half expected McCallum to come storming into the office demanding explanations. But he didn’t. Nothing was said at all, by him or by anyone else. Life went on as usual, and by the end of the day, she’d relaxed. She’d overreacted to Sam’s presence in Whitehorn. It would be all right. He was probably on his way out of town even now.
McCallum was drinking a beer. He hardly ever had anything even slightly alcoholic. His mother had taught him well what alcohol could do. Therefore, he was always on guard against overindulgence.
That being the case, it was only one beer. He was off duty and not on call. Before he’d met the newcomer in the café that morning, he might have taken Jessica to a movie. Now he felt sick inside. She’d never told him the things he’d learned from Sam Jackson.
Jessica was a pretty woman when she dressed up. She’d been interning at the social-services office, Sam Jackson had told him, when she’d gone out to see his brother Fred. Fred’s wife had become jealous of the way Jessica was out there all the time, and she’d left him. Jessica teased and flirted with him, and then, when things got out of hand and the poor man was maddened with passion, she’d yelled rape and had him arrested. The man had hardly touched her. He’d gone to jail for attempted rape, got out on parole six months later and was killed in a horrible car wreck. His wife and child had been lost to him, he was disgraced and it was all Jessica’s fault. Everybody believed her wild lies.
Sam Jackson was no fly-by-night con man. He’d been a respected councilman in Whitehorn for many years and was still known locally. McCallum had asked another old-timer, who’d verified that Jessica had had Jackson’s brother arrested for sexual assault. It had been a closed hearing, very hushed up, and a bit of gossip was all that managed to escape the tight-lipped sheriff, Judd Hensley, and the attorneys and judge in the case. But people knew it was Jessica who had been involved, and the rumors had flown for weeks, even after Fred Jackson’s family left town and he was sent to jail for attempted rape.
The old man had shaken his head as he recalled the incident. Women always said no when they meant yes, he assured McCallum, and several people thought that Jessica had only gotten what she’d asked for, going out to a man’s house alone. Women had too goldarned much freedom, the old-timer said. If they’d never gotten the vote, life would have been better all around.
McCallum didn’t hear the sexism in the remark; he was too outraged over what he’d learned about Jessica. So that shy, retiring pose was just that—an act. She’d played him for an absolute fool. No woman could be trusted. Hadn’t he learned from his mother how treacherous they could be? His mother had smiled so sweetly when people came, infrequently, to the house. She’d lied with a straight face when a neighbor had asked questions about all the yelling and smashing of glass the night before. Nothing had happened except that she’d dropped a vase, she’d insisted, and she’d cried out because it startled her.
Actually, she’d been raving mad from too much alcohol and had been chasing her son around the house with an empty gin bottle. That was the night she’d broken his arm. She’d managed to convince the local doctor, the elderly practitioner who’d preceeded Jessica’s father, that he’d slipped and fallen on a rain-wet porch. She’d tried to coax him to set it and say nothing out of loyalty to the family. But Sterling had told. His mother had hurt him. She’d lied deliberately about their home life. She’d pretended to love him, until she drank. And then she was like another person, a brutal and unfeeling one who only wanted to hurt him. He’d never trusted another woman since.
Until Jessica. She was the one exception. He’d grown close to her during their meetings, and he wanted her in every way there was. He valued her friendship, her company. But she’d lied to him, by omission. She hadn’t told him the truth about her past.
There was one other truth Sam Jackson had imparted to him, an even worse one. In the course of the trial, it had come out that the doctor who had examined Jessica found a blockage in her fallopian tubes that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for her to get pregnant.
She knew that Sterling was interested in her, that he would probably want children. Yet she’d made sure that she never told him that one terrible fact about herself. She could not give him a child. Yet she’d never stopped going out with him, and she knew that he was growing involved with her. It was a lie by omission, but still a lie. It was the one thing, he confessed to himself, that he could never forgive.
He was only grateful that he’d found her out in time, before he’d made an utter fool of himself.
Eight
Unfortunately, it was impossible for Jessica not to notice that McCallum’s attitude toward her had changed since Sam Jackson’s advent into town. He didn’t call her that evening or the next day. And when she was contacted by the sheriff’s office because the child of one of her client families—Keith Colson—was picked up for shoplifting, she wondered if he would have.
She went to the sheriff’s office as quickly as she could. McCallum was there as arresting officer. He was polite and not hateful, but he was so distant that Jessica hardly knew what to say to him.
She sat down in a char beside the lanky boy in the interrogation room and laid her purse on the table.
“Why did you do it, Keith?” she asked gently.
He shrugged and averted his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“You were caught in the act,” she pressed, aware of McCallum standing quietly behind her, waiting. “The store owner saw you pick up several packages of cigarettes and stick them in your pockets. He said you even looked into the camera while you were doing it. You didn’t try to hide what you were doing.”
Keith moved restlessly in the chair. “I did it, okay? How about locking me up now?” he added to McCallum. “This time I wasn’t an accomplice. This time I’m the—what do you call it?—the perpetrator. That means I do time, right? When are you going to lock me up?”
McCallum was scowling. Something wasn’t right here. The boy looked hunted, afraid, but not because he’d been caught shoplifting. He’d waited patiently for McCallum to show up and arrest him, and he’d climbed into the back of the patrol car almost eagerly. There was one other disturbing thing: a fading bruise, a big one, was visible beside his eye.
“I can’t do that yet,” McCallum said. “We’ve called the juvenile authorities. You’re under age, so you’ll have to be turned over to them.”
“Juvenile? Not again! But I wasn’t an accomplice, you know I did it. I did it all by myself! I shouldn’t have to go back home this time!”
McCallum hitched up his slacks and sat down on the edge of the table, facing the boy. “Why don’t you tell me the truth?” he invited quietly. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”
Keith looked as if he wanted to say something, as if it was eating him up inside not to. But at the last minute, his eyes lowered and he shrugged.
“Nothing to tell,” he said gruffly. He glanced at McCallum. “There’s a chance that they might keep me, isn’t there? At the juvenile hall, I mean?”
McCallum scowled. “No. You’ll be sent home after they’ve done the paperwork and your hearing’s scheduled.”
Keith’s face fell. He sighed and wouldn’t say another word. McCallum could remember seeing that particular expression on a youngster’s face only once before. It had been on his own face, the night the doctor set the arm his mother had broken. He had to get to the bottom of Keith’s situation, and he knew he couldn’t do that by talking to Keith or any of his family. There had to be another way, a better way. Perhaps he could talk to some people at Keith’s school. Someone there might know more than he did and be able to shed some light on the situation for him.
Jessica went out to see Keith’s father and grandmother. She’d hoped McCallum might offer to go with her, but he left as soon as Keith was delivered to the juvenile officer. It was all too obvious that he found Jessica’s company distasteful, probably because Sam Jackson had been filling his head full of hal
f-truths. If he’d only come out and accuse her of something, she could defend herself. But how could she make any sort of defense against words that were left unspoken?
Terrance Colson was not surprised to hear that his son was in trouble with the law.
“I knew the boy was up to no good,” he told Jessica blithely. “Takes after his mother, you know. She ran off with a salesman and dumped him on me and his grandmother years ago. Never wanted him in the first place.” He sounded as if he felt the same way. “God knows I’ve done my best for him, but he never appreciates anything at all. He’s always talking back, making trouble. I’m not surprised that he stole things, no, sir.”
“Did you know that he smoked?” Jessica asked deliberately, curious because the boy’s grandmother stayed conspicuously out of sight and never even came out to the porch, when Jessica knew she’d heard the truck drive up.
“Sure I knew he smoked,” Terrance said evenly. “I won’t give him money to throw away on cigarettes. That’s probably why he stole them.”
That was a lie. Jessica knew it was, because McCallum had offered the boy a cigarette in the sheriff’s office and he’d refused it with a grimace. He’d said that he didn’t like cigarettes, although he quickly corrected that and said that he just didn’t want one at the moment. But there were no nicotine stains on his fingers, and he certainly didn’t smell of tobacco.
“You tell them to send him home, now, as soon as they get finished with him,” Terrance told Jessica firmly. “I got work to do around here and he’s needed. They can’t lock him up.”
“They won’t,” she assured him. “But he won’t tell us anything. Not even why he did it.”
“Because he needed cigarettes, that’s why,” the man said unconvincingly.
Jessica understood why McCallum had been suspicious. The longer she talked to the boy’s father, the more curious she became about the situation. She asked a few more questions, but he was as unforthcoming as Keith himself had been. Eventually, she got up to leave.
“I’d like to say hello to Mrs. Colson,” she began.
“Oh, she’s too busy to come out,” he said with careful indifference. “I’ll give her your regards, though.”
“Yes. You do that.” Jessica smiled and held out her hand deliberately. As Terrance reluctantly took it, she saw small bruises on his knuckles. He was righthanded. If he hit someone, it would be with the hand she was holding.
She didn’t remark on the bruises. She left the porch, forming a theory that was very disturbing. She wished that she and McCallum were on better terms, because she was going to need his help. She was sorry she hadn’t listened to him sooner. If she had, perhaps Keith wouldn’t have another shoplifting charge on his record.
When she got back to her office, she called the sheriff’s office and asked them to have McCallum drop by. Once, he would have stopped in the middle of whatever he was doing to oblige her. But today it was almost quitting time before he put in a belated appearance. And he didn’t look happy about being summoned, either.
She had to pretend that it didn’t matter, that she wasn’t bothered that he was staring holes through her with those angry dark eyes. She forced a cool smile to her lips and invited him to sit down.
“I’ve had a long talk with Keith’s father,” she said at once. “He says that Keith smokes and that’s why he took the cigarettes.”
“Bull,” he said curtly.
“I know. I didn’t notice any nicotine stains on Keith’s fingers. But I did notice some bruises on Terrance’s knuckles and a fading bruise near Keith’s eye,” she added.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Observant, aren’t you?” he asked with thinly veiled sarcasm. “You were the one who said there was nothing wrong at Keith’s home, as I recall.”
She sat back heavily in her chair. “Yes, I was. I should have listened to you. The thing is, what can we do about it? His father isn’t going to admit that he’s hitting him, and Keith is too loyal to tell anyone about it. I even thought about talking to old Mrs. Colson, but Terrance won’t let me near her.”
“Unless Keith volunteers the information, we have no case,” McCallum replied. “The district attorney isn’t likely to ask a judge to issue an arrest warrant on anyone’s hunch.”
She grimaced. “I know.” She laced her fingers together. “Meanwhile, Keith’s desperate to get away from home, even to the extent of landing himself in jail to accomplish it. He won’t stop until he does.”
“I know that.”
“Then do something!” she insisted.
“What do you have in mind?”
She threw up her hands. “How do I know? I’m not in law enforcement.”
His dark eyes narrowed accusingly on her face. “No. You’re in social work. And you take your job very seriously, don’t you?”
It was a pointed remark, unmistakable. She sat up straight, with her hands locked together on her cluttered desk, and stared at him levelly. “Go ahead,” she invited. “Get it off your chest.”
“All right,” he said without raising his voice. “You can’t have a child of your own.”
She’d expected to be confronted with some of the old gossip, with anything except this. Her face paled. She couldn’t even explain it to him. Her eyes fell.
The guilt told him all he needed to know. “Did you ever plan to tell me?” he asked icily. “Or wasn’t it any of my business?”
She stared at the small print on a bottle of correction fluid until she had it memorized. “I thought…we weren’t serious about each other, so it…wasn’t necessary to tell you.”
He didn’t want her to know how serious he’d started to feel about her. It made him too vulnerable. He crossed one long leg over the other.
“And how about the court trial?” he added. “Weren’t you going to mention anything about it, either?”
Her weary eyes lifted to his. “You must surely realize that Sam Jackson isn’t anyone’s idea of an unbiased observer. It was his brother. Naturally, he’d think it was all my fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” he asked coldly. “You did go out to the man’s house all alone, didn’t you?”
That remark was a slap in the face. She got to her feet, her eyes glittering. “I don’t have to defend a decision I made years ago to you,” she said coolly. “You have no right to accuse me of anything.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had,” he returned. “Do you feel guilty about what happened to Jackson’s brother?”
Her expression hardened to steel. “I have nothing to feel guilty about,” she said with as much pride as she could manage. “Given the same circumstances, I’d do exactly what I did again and I’d take the consequences.”
He scowled at her. “Including costing a man his family, subjecting him to public humiliation and eventually to what amounted to suicide?”
So that was what Sam had been telling people. That Jessica had driven the man to his death.
She sat back down. “If you care about people,” she said quietly, “you believe them. If you don’t, all the words in the world won’t change anything. Sam should have been a lawyer. He really has a gift for influencing opinion. He’s certainly tarred and feathered me in only two days.”
“The truth usually comes out, doesn’t it?” he countered.
She didn’t flinch. “You don’t know the truth. Not that it matters anymore.” She was heartsick. She pulled her files toward her. “If you’ll excuse me, Deputy McCallum, I’ve already got a day’s work left to finish. I’ll have another talk with Keith when the juvenile officers bring him back to the sheriff’s office.”
“You do that.” He got up, furious because she wouldn’t offer him any explanation, any apology for keeping him in the dark. “You might have told me the truth in the beginning,” he added angrily.
She opened a file. “We all have our scars. Mine are such that it hurts to take them out and look at them.” She lifted wounded dark eyes to his. “I can’t ever have babies,” she said stiffly. “Now yo
u know. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t have, because I never had any intention of letting our relationship go that far. You were the one who kept pushing your way into my life. If you had just let me alone…!” She stopped, biting her lower lip to stifle the painful words. She turned a sheet of paper over deftly. “Sam Jackson’s brother got what he deserved, McCallum. And that’s the last thing I’ll ever say about it.”
He stood watching her for a minute before he finally turned and went out. He walked aimlessly into the outer office. She was right. He was the one who’d pursued her, not the reverse. All the same, she might have told him the truth.
“Hi, McCallum,” Bess called to him from her desk, smiling sweetly.
He paused on his way out and smiled back. “Hi, yourself.”
She gave him a look that could have melted ice. “I guess you and Jessica are too thick for me to try my luck, hmm?” she asked with a mock sigh.
He lifted his chin and his dark eyes shimmered as he looked at her. “Jessica and I are friends,” he said, refusing to admit that they were hardly even that anymore. “That’s all.”
“Well, in that case, why don’t you come over for supper tonight and I’ll feed you some of my homemade spaghetti?” she asked softly. “Then we can watch that new movie on cable. You know, the one with all the warnings on it?” she added suggestively.
She was pretty and young and obviously had no hang-ups about being a woman. He pursed his lips. It had been a long, dry spell, although something in him resisted dating a woman so close to Jessica. On the other hand, he told himself, Jessica had lied to him, and what was it to her if he dated one of her employees?
“What time?” he asked gruffly.
She brightened. “Six sharp. I live next door to Truman Haynes. You know where his house is, don’t you?” He nodded. “Well, I rent his furnished cottage. It’s very cozy, and old Truman goes to bed real early.”
“Does he, now?” he mused.
She grinned. “Yes, indeed!”