by Ken Casper
“Is that what you did? Forge her name?”
He shook his head. “No. I could never have faced her when she found out, and of course she would have.”
He paced the worn Oriental rug. “After our fight, I went down to the dock. I was steaming, but I at least had the smarts not to do anything in the heat of the moment.”
“Not many people have that kind of wisdom. Especially not teenagers.”
He agreed. “And that’s what makes Amanda’s statement so damning.” He took a deep breath. “I had a real problem with my temper after I first went to live with Frannie.”
“Which is understandable,” Gwyn said sympathetically. “You’d been through a lot.”
“Anyway,” Jed continued without dwelling on it, “Frannie taught me to cool off before I acted.” He settled at last into the chair across from Gwyn. “I don’t deny I was enraged when she refused to give me her permission. Deep down inside, though, I knew she was right. I wasn’t a great violinist. I was mediocre good, and that was all I was ever going to be.” He inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. “The truth, Gwyn, is that by the time I stomped out of the house that morning, I was no longer mad at Frannie. I was mad at myself.” He paused, his face glum. “In the heat of the moment I did something I’ve been ashamed of for nineteen years. I insulted her.”
He pictured the pained expression on her face when he reminded her that they were poor. I’m doing the best I can, was all she’d had to counter with. Few people could say that with any degree of honesty. Frannie could, but there was humiliation in her acknowledgment.
“She’d been good to me, Gwyn, good to all of us. She worked hard, and in return all I did was complain because I had to share a room with Will.”
“You loved her very much. She knew that.” When Jed didn’t look convinced, she added, “Kids often say things they don’t mean, or say them in a way they don’t intend.”
Too painfully, she remembered her parting conversation with her mother in which she accused the socially perfect woman of being a selfish, arrogant phony who hid behind glamour and posturing. “Hide what?” her mother had demanded in that snugly superior tone that until then had been enough to intimidate. “Hide the fact,” Gwyn had answered back, “that you don’t have a soul.”
Claudia Miller’s eyes had grown big with amazement, and for an insane moment, Gwyn thought she saw admiration for her cutting words, but a pained expression quickly followed. To this day Gwyn didn’t know if her mother had actually been offended by the barb or was just putting on another of her performances. In any event, Gwyn had refused to back down. Not this time. Not ever again. Goodbye, Mother.
“I’m sure she understood you were upset and didn’t mean it,” she told Jed, but he didn’t look consoled. “Where did you go?”
“I took my swamp boat and went fishing.”
To the piney woods he’d taken her to last week, she thought. She could picture a confused teenager going there to sulk and try to sort things out.
“Emmy and Will barely made the school bus. I had my own car and usually drove in. Seniors didn’t have to be at school as early as the others, especially in those last few weeks of the term. I stomped down to the boat dock. I remember Frannie calling after me, but I ignored her.”
Gwyn knew nothing would ever relieve him of the pain of that parting. Words of consolation were useless and might be perceived as patronizing. “Did you hear her car drive away?” she asked.
He thought about it for a minute. “I don’t think so.” He didn’t sound sure. “But it would have been a noise that’s so familiar it doesn’t register when you hear it.”
“So you don’t know if she left her place and came back later, perhaps with her murderer, or met him there after you went out in your boat.”
Dejected, he shook his head. “I wish I did.”
Gwyn rose and went behind his chair and massaged the taut muscles of his neck. “I’d like you to come with me over to the house, Jed. There’s something I want to show you.”
He turned his head and looked up, curious, her breasts so close that it was difficult for him to concentrate. “About Frannie?”
“About me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“YOU SAID you stayed in Frannie’s house after she disappeared. By yourself?” Gwyn asked, as they strolled the path between Beaumarais and Frannie’s old place. The air was calm and sweet.
He nodded. “The authorities didn’t quite know what to do with me. I was two months shy of eighteen, so theoretically I wasn’t an adult, but I was due to graduate in six weeks and pulling me out of school would have cost me a diploma.”
They walked into the bright sunshine. “Remember, too,” he continued, “we didn’t really know what had happened to Frannie. We never received a ransom note, so it didn’t seem likely someone had kidnapped her, yet with her clothes and car still there, it seemed pretty clear she hadn’t left voluntarily. I guess we all knew she was dead, but no one wanted to say it.”
“The uncertainty must have been terrible.”
If he noticed the unintended pun on the name of the town, he didn’t acknowledge it. They reached the back door of the house. Romeo, tail wagging, trotted up to greet them, eager to be petted. Jed scratched behind the sheltie’s ears.
She opened the door but ordered the dog to stay on the enclosed porch. Romeo and Cleopatra had always gotten along very well, and Gwyn didn’t think he would do any harm to the kittens, but there was no sense in tempting fate. Animosity between the two species was a far older instinct than amity.
The morning sun angled into the screened area, filling it with a golden light. She crossed the tiled floor and entered the house proper. Cleopatra, resting contentedly on her side in the newspaper-lined box, purred loudly enough to be heard across the room. The gargling stopped when Jed raised his hand to pet her, but then resumed with even greater intensity.
Except for the dishwasher Jed had installed next to the sink several years ago, the kitchen was almost exactly as it had been when Frannie left it nineteen years ago. An unexpected wave of emotions—melancholy, anger—rippled through him. Whoever murdered Frannie hadn’t just taken a single life. He’d robbed peace from many more. Where was Emmy? Where was Will? Were they alive, safe? Had they been able to find happiness? Would he ever see them again? Questions he had pondered many times.
Gwyn glanced at Jed as she closed the door behind them. She didn’t know exactly what was going through his mind, but she was sure it had something to do with his foster mother and was painful. She wondered if the sadness that seemed to be a permanent part of him would ever be lifted.
“How long did you stay here by yourself’?” she asked as she set about feeding Cleopatra and relining her box with clean newspaper. The kittens’ eyes were open now. As she worked, she tried to imagine what it had been like for Jed—alone in the house that had once been happy, always listening for a familiar voice, a greeting that would end the feeling of abandonment.
His face retained a blank faraway look for a second before he answered. “About six weeks. Long enough to graduate. I passed my final exams by the skin of my teeth, escorted Amanda to the senior prom—” he smirked “—and disappointed her by not taking her to the Shady Lane Motel in Marshall for a night of mad sex.”
It shouldn’t matter now. It was nearly two decades ago. But Gwyn was glad he’d rejected the sexy blonde. “So you never went to Juilliard.”
“Actually, I did. I turned eighteen shortly after graduation, submitted the application myself and went to New York City. I was there exactly two weeks and came back. Frannie was right. It wasn’t where I belonged.”
He leaned against the counter next to the refrigerator. The muted light spilling in from the window over the sink opposite him cast his tall frame in sensuous relief.
“It must have been a terrible
disappointment.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled, “but not a surprise. We don’t always know when we’re good at something, but I think we know when we’re bad. My counselor there held out hope that I might develop a talent for composition, but I wasn’t interested in that aspect of music.”
Gwyn propped herself against the kitchen table. “What did you do?”
“Came back to Uncertain. Whether Ray had also figured out I wasn’t going to make it in the Big Apple, I don’t know, but he definitely believed in hedging bets. He’d insisted before I left that I accept the basketball scholarship to the University of Texas, saying I could always reject it later. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it, but I was glad later he talked me into it. I packed up all my worldly goods and headed west to Austin.”
“Did you give up music altogether?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not completely. I joined a country western band. Between a full load of courses and playing basketball, I didn’t have much spare time on my hands, but I managed a few gigs here and there, enough to keep me in pocket money.”
“Do you still play?”
“The fiddle’s up in the music room, but it’s been a long time since I’ve touched it.”
“I’d like to hear you sometime.”
He grinned. “Maybe.”
She smiled back. After a moment she asked, “By the way, did you major in something practical in college?”
He let out a soft chuckle. “Biology, and soon found out it was as difficult to get rich as a biologist as it is as a musician.” He ran a hand through his thick black hair and grinned ironically. “But I’d taken Frannie’s dictum to heart and was determined to earn my own way. Ray offered to give me an allowance from my uncle’s estate, which he managed, but I insisted on working full-time during the summers, so Ray gave me a job at the bank. That’s when he got me hooked on real estate and mortgage banking.”
“Sounds like he really was a good adviser.”
Jed nodded. “He was.”
Gwyn wondered if Jed realized it had been in Ray’s own self-interest to befriend the lonely heir. She suspected he did, but that it didn’t matter, and perhaps it didn’t. She knew from experience what it was like to be suddenly alone, unsure of oneself and the world around you.
She smiled sympathetically. “You’re very fortunate to have had him then.”
She’d never had such a mentor in high school, someone she could confide in, someone she could count on for sound advice and encouragement. On the few occasions when she did try to share her thoughts and aspirations with a friend, her confidences inevitably reached her parents, who made it clear that her goals and aspirations were inappropriate for a person of her station. The lesson wasn’t hard to learn. Trust no one. Keep your own council. You’re on your own.
The mood in the kitchen had grown unexpectedly somber.
“So what is this great surprise you want me to see?” he asked, looking around eagerly.
The lightheartedness he was trying to engender didn’t seem to convey itself. The serious expression remained on her face.
“I grew up with manipulation and half truths, Jed, not to mention outright lies,” she told him. “My parents defended themselves on the few occasions I questioned them by saying they were only protecting me. After all, there were opportunists out there, willing to say or do anything to get my money. Which no doubt was true—at the time. What my parents didn’t seem able to comprehend was that by using deception and dishonesty, they made themselves deceptive and dishonest, too.”
Jed understood her words—at least on the surface. What he couldn’t figure out was their significance.
Gwyn pushed away from the table and tilted her head. “Follow me.”
Moving from the kitchen into the living room, she entered what had been Emmy’s bedroom. Standing aside, she nodded toward the corner between the two windows. There, grouped with a straight-backed chair and a music stand, was a cello.
Jed froze in the doorway, his eyes wide. “You play?”
She grinned. “Like you, I loved the violin—until I discovered the cello. My mother wasn’t particularly pleased with my choice.” She smirked and nearly giggled. “A lady doesn’t spread her legs.”
Jed’s laugh was spontaneous and filled with impish mirth. “It depends upon where and when.”
He walked over and reverently examined the instrument that gleamed in the soft light of the shadowy room. “It’s magnificent, Gwyn.” And expensive, he noted.
“My uncle gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday when he realized I was serious about it. It’s my prize possession, the only thing of real value I took with me when I left home, except for the Land Rover, of course.”
Jed plucked a string and closed his eyes as he listened to the reverberation of its deep, mysterious tone. “Beautiful.” He took in the sight of her, still standing beside the doorway. There was a shy glow about her, an almost childlike pride, but he also sensed the guardedness of a mature woman.
“I don’t want any more secrets between us, Jed. No hidden agendas, no white lies or half truths.”
The unshed tears glazing her eyes tore at him, heated his blood, made him want to protect her from ever being hurt again. He placed his hand just below her ear and felt the measured throb of her heartbeat under the soft, delicate skin. Slowly, he brought his lips down to hers and gently made sweet contact.
“Will you play for me?” he asked with a quiet smile.
The request pleased her and sent a warm feeling shimmering through her. “Maybe one day.”
He was disappointed, but he didn’t press her. He had no idea how much or how well she played, and he didn’t want to embarrass her into doing something she wasn’t comfortable with. He understood the need to make music, and how very private that pleasure could be.
He took her elbow and guided her to the foot of the twin bed, where they sat side by side, facing the instrument. The room was small. The only other furniture was a dresser.
“Did you want to be a professional musician?” he asked.
She stretched out her arms, trapping her hands between her knees. “Among other things, but none of my ambitions was ever suitable. Being a dilettante was perfectly acceptable and preferable for a young lady in my mother’s circle. Being a professional at anything, other than a refined lady and model wife, was not.”
“Sounds frustrating.”
She nodded sadly. “Several of my mother’s friends had genuine talents and skills that went beyond those of being the perfect hostess, but they were forced to hide them under bushel baskets of hothouse roses.” She sighed. “Maybe that’s why many of them were alcoholics and hypochondriacs.”
The waste had Jed shaking his head. “So when you left home and struck out on your own, did you pursue a musical career?”
“It was too late.” She reached over and rested a hand on his thigh. “It wasn’t important to me to be a soloist. I probably could have gotten jobs in various orchestras, but the fire of ambition had burned out, smothered. I love music,” she insisted, “but I have no desire to perform for other people. Maybe . . . someday . . .”
He took her hand in his and brought it up to his mouth and pressed his lips to it. “Someday what?”
She closed her eyes and savored the feel of his touch, the closeness of his body. “Maybe someday we can play the double concerto together.”
Still holding her hand, he shifted around and peered into her eyes. “I’d like that, making music with you. A duet of melodies that intertwine and wrap around each other, that complement and complete each other.”
He brought his lips to hers, touched them, then pulled away. She wanted more, but instead of being encouraged by her receptiveness, he seemed to withdraw.
“Jed, what is it?”
He rose and began pacing th
e narrow space at the foot of the bed, raking a hand across his face like a man waking up, sobering.
“I care for you, Gwyn,” he muttered, “in a way I’ve never cared for any woman. I want you in my life and in my bed. I want to spend the rest of my life making love and music with you.”
She gazed up at him. “Are you saying you love me, Jed?”
An unfamiliar tension invaded his body as he turned and studied her—the woman of his dreams, if he allowed himself to dream.
“Because if you are—” she carried the conviction of one who has made a bold decision “—you should know I think I’m in love with you, too.”
“No,” he cried, and instantly saw the hurt in her eyes just before she lowered them. Color tiptoed up her neck. He sat once more beside her, lifted a hand and tilted her head up enough to capture her glistening gaze. “I do love you, Gwyn, but I can’t ask you to love me in return.”
“I didn’t know I needed your permission.” Her voice was husky now, filled with an anger born of humiliation. She’d offered him her love, and he’d rejected it.
He gathered her in his arms. The contradiction between his words and his gestures confused her, until she allowed herself to be guided by her feelings. Impulsively she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his chest.
“I can’t make a commitment to you, Gwyn, not while there’s a murder charge hanging over my head, and I have no right to ask you to wait for things to get better. Maybe they never will. Fielder might yet find something that proves I killed Frannie.”
She pulled away enough to look up into his brooding eyes. “But you didn’t.”
Was it a statement or a question? The ambiguity cut into him like a rusty knife. “You don’t know that,” he said.
Her smile, a little sad, yet remarkably reassuring, broke through incipient tears. “I do know it, Jed. I know it in my mind. More important, I know it in my heart. You couldn’t possibly have killed her.”