“Don’t tell me Jared’s little whore is pregnant again,” she sneered, laughing maliciously when Winsome paled. “You’re worse than a bitch on heat the way you keep my son dangling at your pants.”
Winsome tightened her lips and stayed silent. It was her only defence against Gaelen’s vicious tongue. She was only thankful Paige had left for work. It was always worse when they were both here and she was alone without Jared’s presence to protect her from their venom.
“You have no right to speak to Winsome like that,” Quentin protested, eyeing his mother with loathing. “Jared would be livid if he knew how you treated his wife behind his back. Why don’t you tell Jared, Winsome?”
“Because she’s too frightened of what I know about her to complain to Jared, aren’t you dear?” Gaelen’s smile was pure malice.
“Well I’m not,” Quentin said getting to his feet his expression grim. “If she won’t tell Jared, I will.”
Too ill to face Gaelen’s maliciousness this morning, Winsome scooped Matthew from his high chair and went out to the laundry to do their washing. She set the baby on the floor to play with the toys she kept there, while she put the first load of washing in the machine. She was staring in stony-eyed misery at the bucket of soiled napkins when Quentin came in and pushed the door closed behind him.
“Is Mum blackmailing you, Winsome?”
Almost eighteen and in his final term at college, Quentin was as tall as his elder brother but hadn’t yet reached his breadth of shoulder. He was open and honest and had been her friend from the day Jared had brought her home as a shy, insecure young bride.
Winsome met his steely grey eyes and nodded bleakly.
“Tonight I’m going to put a stop to it.” His grim expression reminded her of Jared when anything angered him. “I’m going to tell Dad and Jared what Mum is doing to you and Matthew. I can tell you that I’ll never let my wife share the same house as that bitch.”
“Quentin don’t talk about your mother like that.”
“It’s true,” he said hotly. “It’s not fair what she’s doing to you.”
“What in life is fair?”
All her life she’d been dogged by unfairness. She’d been teased and taunted about being a murderer’s daughter. Wherever she’d gone the whispers followed, until she’d married Jared.
For three blissful months she had been in heaven until Gaelen had somehow discovered her guilty secret and made her life hell on earth.
“Oh Winsome.” He slipped his strong young arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Let me protect you if Jared can’t.”
Carefully she disengaged herself, not wanting to damage his young pride and masculine ego. She had been hurt so often herself, she knew how easily young people his age could be wounded.
“You’re a very nice young man, and I appreciate your concern,” she said gently, then seeing his adoring look added with quiet firmness. “Quentin. I’m your brother’s wife. Please don’t weave fantasies around me. I love Jared and there’ll never anyone else for either of us, no matter what happens with your mother. We’re mates and always will be.”
Quentin looked so crestfallen, Winsome was fiercely glad she had stopped Jared being brutally sarcastic about his crush on her. It could have caused an irreparable breach between the brothers. She laid a hand on his arm.
“Go and find yourself your own mate, Quentin. Then we can all be dear friends.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I love Jared and I’m almost sure I’m pregnant with our second baby. Surely you must have scores of girls chasing you at school?”
“They’re all so young and dumb.” He looked like a whipped puppy, kicked by the person it adored, and didn’t understand why. Winsome wanted to laugh but knew she didn’t dare. “There is a girl…she’s quite nice.”
“Why not ask her for a date?” she suggested, gently encouraging.
“What if she says no?”
“What if she says yes?” she teased, eyes sparkling with sudden mischief. “If she has any sense she’ll be wild with delight.”
He managed to grin back at her and Winsome eyed him with a glimmer of her wicked humour.
“If she’s not interested—” Winsome watched him closely— “you’d make a great step-Daddy. Wouldn’t you like to take two babies with you everywhere? To rugby or the movies and the disco. I’m sure your mates would understand.”
He looked from her to Matthew with such undisguised horror, Winsome could barely hold in her laughter. It was so obvious Quentin had never really thought about her being a mother with nearly two children always in tow.
“I would never leave my babies, Quentin.”
He left without a backward glance.
Later, when she was hanging out the clothes, Winsome burst out laughing as she remembered his horrified reaction to being seen toting his nephew everywhere, let alone a new baby and all its related paraphernalia. She had successfully squelched his crush on the spot.
She rang Clinton Perry and made an appointment.
After asking Gaelen to listen for Matthew and agreeing to get a few things for the other woman, Winsome went off to town without a qualm at leaving the baby in Gaelen’s care. No matter what she thought of Winsome, Gaelen openly adored her grandson. He was a Grainger. She often babysat him while Jared and Winsome went out.
Matthew, tired and grumpy and cutting his molars, was fast asleep when Winsome left and she had every expectation of being back before he woke. She came out of the doctor’s, flushed with a rosy glow of contentment, knowing Jared would be delighted that she’d conceived.
He wanted another baby as a companion for Matthew.
Buoyed with hope that, with the confirmation of her second pregnancy, Jared would shift them into their own home, she was literally walking on air.
Surely, he couldn’t refuse now.
Light-hearted, she collected a couple of things Gaelen wanted, and then drove home singing softly all the way. After she’d parked the car, she went inside and went straight to check on her baby. Finding Matthew’s cot empty, she went out to the lounge. Gaelen was sitting in her chair, crocheting another of those unending lace cloths she had spread everywhere in the house.
“I’m back. Where’s Matthew?” Winsome glanced around and couldn’t see him. Panic bloomed inside her.
“He went down the garden an hour ago.”
For a few paralysed seconds Winsome couldn’t think, she couldn’t move.
“You know dear,” Gaelen said softly, “We’re quite ruthless on farms. Animals with genetic defects are put down. And you and I both know what genetic defect Matthew has with your tainted blood, don’t we?”
It took several stunned seconds for Winsome to comprehend the enormity of Gaelen’s words.
The lily pond. My God. My baby and that damn pond.
Winsome raced out the door and took the steps in one flying leap.
Somewhere, someone was screaming and screaming and screaming, terrible, tormented, high-pitched screams.
They rent the air. Ripping apart the tranquil country quiet and causing dogs to howl in frenzied alarm. They floated in endless, turbulent waves that made men drop tools and neighbours come flying, desperate to still their source.
Winsome reached the pond. Her cherished baby lay floating face down under the water. She leaped in and pulled him out, cradling his lifeless body in leaden arms.
His clothes were plastered wetly to his still form.
Lily leaves clung like obscene leeches sticking to his clothes. She stroked wet, golden curls away from his unsmiling face. Glazed, lifeless blue eyes were staring horribly. A stream of muddy water dribbled from slack white lips.
The dreadful, harshly dry screams continued and Winsome wished they would stop. People came running from all directions.
Jared was there, ashen and shaking. He lifted his hand and slapped her cheek and the screams stopped.
The silence hurt everyone’s ears.
Harvey lifted Matthew’s lifeless body from her clinging hands.
“Get her out of here, son.” He looked from his Matthew to Winsome. “For God’s sake get her away from here.”
Jared lifted her in his arms, smothering her face against his chest. As he carried her up the steps he met his mother.
“What’s the matter? What’s happened?” Gaelen, wearing only a petticoat, stood with a hand over her heart, shaking in agitation.
“It’s Matthew. He drowned in the pond.”
“But Winsome was watching him. I checked before I went to lie down. She was watching him.” Great crocodile tears slid down her pale cheeks.
There was a great heavy weight in Winsome’s chest, where once her heart had been. It made each drawn breath a minor triumph. Deep within her shocked detachment, she saw and heard everything.
At her feet, a great abyss opened.
Deeper and deeper she slipped into its dark void until it closed over her head and she was entombed. With devastating certainty, she knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
She heard the voices, but lacked the strength to return from that black cold place.
Jared carried her to their room and checked in shock in the doorway. She turned her head and saw the rumpled covers. The new book she had bought that afternoon, lay open face down. It was how she always left her book when she was reading.
“You were reading,” Jared hissed in stunned disbelief. “You were reading while our son drowned.”
She stared at him, not quite comprehending.
Jared laid her on the bed, picked up the book and hurled it at the wall where it landed with a heavy thud, falling in an obscene heap on the floor, its pages crumpled and torn. He stood looking down at her his face as hard as carved granite.
“You killed my son, Winsome. Had you been watching him, he would never have drowned. You killed our son.”
Shocked and sick and torn with hurt at his unjust words, Winsome closed her eyes and slipped deeper away. She lay on the bed, unmoving. She was so very cold.
The doctor, summoned to Matthew, gave her an injection.
She heard him berate Jared. “Forget the rights and wrongs. Winsome’s in shock, man. Shock kills. Keep her warm and free from stress.”
She heard the rumble of Jared’s voice as sleep thumbed its opiate hand, granting her a brief reprieve.
It was quiet and still when she wakened.
The moon, riding in silver splendour on its zenith, cast a ghostly glow as it sailed across the night in untroubled serenity, untouched by the petty trials of less exalted beings.
Jared lay beside her, his breath catching in little hiccupping sobs as if he had cried himself to sleep. Memory crashed over her with agonising sureness.
Gaelen killed my baby.
As if he sensed her wakefulness, Jared stirred and put his arm around her shoulders. Winsome lay, utterly unresponsive.
“It’s all right to cry,” he whispered sadly in the darkness. “All we have left now are tears and grief.”
But Winsome didn’t cry.
Nor did she tell Jared what his mother had done.
Gaelen had set the scene of a neglectful mother with diabolic cleverness. Jared would never believe her; he always preferred to believe the evidence of his own eyes. That he thought her capable of reading a book and leaving her baby to wander off, unattended near a danger that worried her silly was a wound she wouldn’t readily recover from.
Enduring the ritual of burying Matthew, she stood straight and erect beside Jared, her eyes untouched by even the glimmer of a tear.
She hugged her grief to her wounded soul.
No one loved her as Matthew had. He was the only person, in her young life who never demanded a single thing from her. His love was pure and unconditional.
In the homestead, snatched echoes of baby laughter haunted her. Every facet of every day held painful remembrance.
In one spurt of spirit, Winsome tried to tell the coroner what had happened the day her baby died, but sedated for the ordeal, her halting, garbled words made little sense. The coroner had been so gentle with her, but had dismissed her claims as a mother’s grief stricken fantasy.
The coroner’s verdict: Accidental death by drowning.
And the short life of Matthew James Grainger passed into memory, almost as if he’d never been.
After this, she avoided everyone until Jared forced her to eat at the dining table.
A month after Matthew’s death she was sitting on the veranda swing, staring into space, when Gaelen found her. Winsome stood up to leave but the older woman caught her frail arm and pushed her back down.
“I’m so glad you saw the sense of not making a fuss over that unfortunate accident.”
That jolted Winsome out of her apathy. “Accident?”
“You can never prove anything. It’s your word against mine,” Gaelen said softly. “And with your history of mental instability who would believe you?”
Swallowing a knot of bitterness, Winsome knew Gaelen was right. She’d tried at the inquest and who had listened? No one.
Jared believed she was culpable in Matthew’s death, he’d believe his mother, not his wife. At the inquest she’d witnessed his disbelief. And if her husband, the man who professed to love her, didn’t believe her, who would?
“The Grainger name is an old and respected one.” Gaelen clenched and unclenched her hand.
Winsome stared at her mother-in-law. In one blinding moment of insight, she knew the woman was deranged. Self-protection instinctively overcame her apathy.
“You’re pregnant again, corrupting our bloodlines,” Gaelen whispered harshly. “But remember my dear, tiny babies die with SIDS every day.”
She got up off the swing and disbelieving, Winsome watched her walk away.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
The threat to her unborn baby achieved what nothing else had managed. Jolted out of her apathy by a ferocious swell of maternal protection, Winsome refused to live even one more day in this house.
While she remained here, her unborn baby was in danger.
And not only my baby. Gaelen wouldn’t think twice about killing me.
Shivering, Winsome knew her responsibility was clear.
This tiny baby, growing inside her had no one else to protect it. If Jared wouldn’t or couldn’t provide that protection, then she would.
But of one thing Winsome was adamantly certain; Gaelen would never see or touch this child.
She went to Harvey and to her surprise, he agreed.
Arrangements were made and within two hours she was packed and ready to leave. When Jared came in for lunch she informed him of her decision. He cajoled, reasoned and even pleaded with her, to no avail.
Furious, hands on hips, he delivered her an ultimatum. “If you leave, Winsome, I will never come after you.”
“I can’t stay in the same house as your mother. You won’t leave, so I have to.”
“It’s time you grew up. This is the real world, not some silly romantic fairy tale. My home is here. If you can’t accept that then leave.”
He held the door open for her and watched, stony-faced and unemotional, as Harvey loaded her suitcases in the car and helped her into the passenger seat.
As she drove away from Totara Park, Winsome vowed she would never again set foot on Grainger land—
…And it was Harvey, always aloof, who surprised her.
He supported her and visited often.
And, Winsome thought soberly, it was Harvey, for twisted reasons of his own, who had forced her to return.
Tonight, she’d looked into Jared’s face and finally relinquished hope. Until then, a stubborn kernel refused to die.
That hope had given her the courage to rebuild her shattered life. It allowed her to take the enormous risk of loving Lacey. Now trapped in an untenable situation by the terms of Harvey’s will, Winsome was tired of Jared’s animosity, tired of being hurt, and tired of
trying to deal with this nightmare on her own.
If she was honest, she was just plain tired...and so darn cold.
She was suddenly alert to the danger, but the cold had done its work, silently and remorselessly. And she was unable to move.
Chapter Twelve
JARED STARED AFTER Winsome’s retreating figure. With a clumsy movement he tried to prevent her escape.
“Leave her, Jared.” Quentin grabbed his arm halting him in mid-stride. “Until you calm down.”
Jared staggered, slumped into a chair and buried his head in his hands.
Quentin looked at his brother’s hunched figure and crossed to the sideboard and poured him a brandy. Jared was in shock. He touched his shoulder and Jared looked up at him, his eyes those of man who’d looked hell directly in the eye.
“Here, you need this.” Quentin handed him the brandy.
Jared downed the fiery liquid in one gulp and the spirits steadied his limbs but couldn’t stop the tortured convolution of his thoughts.
Horror inched through him in spine-chilling increments as he replayed his wife’s every word.
He knew in his heart she’d finally told him the truth. He’d wanted it so badly, wanted to know why she had left him. Now he would give anything not to know.
The agony in Winsome’s wounded blue eyes would haunt him until his dying day.
His mother had murdered Matthew.
With cold-blooded, calculated aforethought that shocked him rigid. His innocent, laughing baby son had been drowned with as little regret as a stray puppy.
Then he remembered Gaelen’s tears as he’d carried Winsome into the house.
Anger invaded his mind and body, swirling and seeking every last cell until he was one incandescent ball of seething rage.
“The evil, two-faced bitch.” Jared swore violently, leaping to his feet, clenching and unclenching his hand in impotent fury. “How could she still look at me and smile?”
Quentin stayed silent. There was nothing he could say or do that would make this any easier for his brother. Jared had to face this awful knowledge on his own.
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