by Sandra Brown
“You’re expecting a miracle?”
“They happen.”
Knight mulled it over and reached a decision. “Where you at?”
“In my car on the way back. About an hour out. I let you sleep in.”
“Thanks.” Knight consulted his wristwatch. “We’re supposed to pick Jeff up at nine.”
“I’ll make it back well before then.”
“So let’s pick up Jeff half an hour early, take him by surprise, and hit him hard with his infidelity. You know the drill.”
“I get to be the bad cop?”
“See you in sixty.”
* * *
“For God’s sake, Alice, would you please get a grip?”
“I don’t think you understand the implications, Jeff.”
“I understand them perfectly. I just don’t think we should panic simply because—”
“Because the detectives have somehow learned about us, when already you think they suspect you of harming Emory? You don’t think that’s cause for panic?”
“I’ll grant you it’s cause for concern, but let’s not blow it out of proportion. Now, take a deep breath, and tell me everything Grange said again.”
She talked him through it, but the repetition didn’t improve the message.
“He showed up at my door before daybreak, Jeff. The timing of his visit alone implies that they’re taking this—our affair—seriously. They see it as a significant factor of Emory’s disappearance. Forgive me, but that’s a bit unsettling.”
He didn’t dispute that. Grange had driven all the way down to Atlanta, which indicated that he and Knight’s random speculations had begun to solidify and actually take shape. Jeff feared that his designation as “frantic husband” might soon be traded for “person of interest.”
If that happened, media cameras would photograph him being escorted into the sheriff’s office by badged personnel with stern faces. Interviews with him would then become official interrogations, and there was a distinct difference. During the former, investigators were deferential and polite. The atmosphere was sensitive and sympathetic.
An interrogation was just the opposite.
He would be forced to retain an attorney, and that was as good as an admission of guilt. There would follow a massive groundswell of distrust and disdain toward him. Nothing he said would be believed. He would be reviled by complete strangers and close associates alike. His clients would question his integrity and take their portfolios to another money manager.
The thought of being subjected to such humiliation caused him to break into a cold sweat. Using a corner of the sheet, he blotted at the trickles of it running from his armpits down his ribs. However, the sour stench of it worked like smelling salts, jolting him back to his senses.
He was getting way ahead of himself. No one had accused him of anything yet. They knew he and Alice were lovers. So? Adultery was a sin, not a crime.
Nevertheless, in the minds of many it would be a serious sin to commit against Emory Charbonneau, champion of the downtrodden, sweetheart of the dispossessed. It was time for him to take preventative measures before he was hung out to dry in the arena of public opinion, where already his wife outscored him by a wide margin. If his infidelity came to light, he might be publically scourged. They’d sell tickets.
Abruptly, he said, “You shouldn’t have called me, Alice. That was the worst possible thing you could have done.”
“Would you rather I let the detectives show up and arrest you without any warning?”
With diminished patience, he said, “They’re not going to arrest me. They have absolutely no basis on which to arrest me. They can’t put me in jail for sleeping with you. Which, under the circumstances, must stop. I’ve got to be an ideal husband, the kind Emory deserves. You and I shouldn’t have any further private contact.”
“Until when?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jeff, please. Let’s talk this through.”
God, he hated her whining. And hated even more that he heard a car pull up just beyond the motel room door. “Don’t call me again.” He clicked off.
Far less confident of avoiding arrest than he’d let on to her, he moved quickly to the window and peered through the crack between the drapes. Knight and Grange were climbing out of their SUV, and they weren’t delivering doughnuts and coffee.
Why were they here a half hour early?
His phone vibrated. “Dammit!”
Knight shouted through the door. “Jeff? You up?” He sounded all business and by no means folksy.
Jeff’s phone continued to vibrate. Cursing under his breath, he answered in a whisper. “I told you. Do not call me again.”
Knight pounded on the door. “Jeff, open up. Now.”
In his ear, “Jeff?”
A key rattled in the lock. Knight had a key to his room?
Through the phone, “Jeff?”
A shoulder was put to the door and, when it came open, the two deputies practically fell into the room. Grange’s hand was on his gun holster. Both drew up short when they saw him standing there shivering in only his underwear.
He felt clammy, lightheaded, and breathless as he smiled and extended his cell phone to Grange. “It’s Emory.”
Chapter 21
He pretended to be one of the volunteers who’d been searching for Emory.
He blended in with them, dressed as most were in heavy outdoor gear. His scarf—the one she’d knifed—covered his chin. He had turned up his coat collar, too, so it covered a good portion of his face. His cap was pulled low. He was wearing dark sunglasses to help hide the scratch she’d inflicted on his cheekbone. It was healing but still visible.
Most of the marks she had left on him weren’t. They were deep inside where wounds were never superficial and scars had significance.
For a city the size of Drakeland, her disappearance and recovery were major events. Upon hearing that she was back in the fold, and feeling the flush of success even though she hadn’t exactly been found, a hundred or more of the volunteers had congregated outside the local hospital to give her a hero’s welcome.
Now, as the sheriff’s office SUV pulled up to the emergency room entrance, it was swarmed by cameramen and reporters, most of whom were up from Atlanta. Gawkers, who had no idea what was going on but were drawn to the spectacle, elbowed for space and a more advantageous view. Uniformed officers were trying with limited success to control the pandemonium.
He stood head and shoulders above everyone in the crowd, but the chance of Emory spotting him was remote. She wouldn’t be looking. This was the last place she would expect him to be.
It was the last place he expected himself to be.
He continued to ask himself why he’d come. The answer continued to elude him. Halfway home after delivering her, he had felt the compulsion to make a U-turn, and he had. Some things one just did and never came to terms with why.
So here he was: the reason for her absence, a witness to her homecoming.
A potbellied man in uniform alighted from the driver’s side of the official vehicle, opened the rear door, and assisted her out of the backseat. With a heavy blanket draped around her shoulders, she looked small and overwhelmed. She was wearing her sunglasses, so her eyes were concealed, but her mouth was unsmiling. Her sneakers were muddy from running the mile between his cabin and the Floyds’ place.
He hadn’t counted on her waking up and realizing where he’d gone in time for her to get there and witness the beating he’d given them. He’d left her snug beneath the covers of his bed, rosy and warm, doped by sex, sound asleep. The next time he saw her, she was standing in the Floyds’ yard, breathless and aghast.
The Floyd brothers were the reason he’d come to North Carolina. He had vowed to seek retribution, vowed to get it. He just hadn’t counted on things happening how they had, or when they had.
He’d considered postponing taking action until Emory was no longer under his roof and compounding the
danger. But after the incident with Lisa, after he and the brothers had declared themselves enemies, he couldn’t predict what they would do. He’d felt he couldn’t delay, that he had to act before the opportunity was lost.
Only a vow as binding as the one he’d made himself regarding Norman and Will Floyd could have dragged him from beneath the soft weight of Emory’s arm across his belly.
He hadn’t seen her until he pitched Norman through the front door and followed him out. She had looked at him with stark horror, but he had gone there with a purpose that even her revulsion couldn’t check.
The deed was done, and it was too late now to call it back. He wouldn’t reverse it even if he could. He didn’t regret doing it. He only regretted her having seen him do it.
That would be her last impression of him. Fresh blood on his hands. An indelible stain darker than that on his soul.
After leaving the Floyds’ place, he’d stopped at the cabin only long enough to go inside and retrieve Emory’s belongings. He’d set the fanny pack in her lap without so much as a blink of acknowledgment from her.
During the long drive down to Drakeland, she had only stared straight ahead, her hands tightly clasped, probably fearing that if she uttered a peep, she would rile the beast she’d seen unleashed.
On the outskirts of town, he’d pulled the pickup to the shoulder of the highway and put the gear in park. “About a half mile up ahead is a gas station. You can call somebody to pick you up there.”
He reached across her knees and opened the glove box, where he’d placed her phone. Earlier, as he’d silently moved about the cabin collecting her things while she slept, he had considered including her phone. He’d spent a night with her that he would die remembering. He would revisit it a million times in his fantasies.
But mistrust was second nature to him. He had decided to hold on to her phone until the very last minute.
Handing it to her, he’d told her that he’d charged the battery. “But I would appreciate it if you didn’t make that call until I get a few minutes’ head start.”
She’d looked at the phone as though not recognizing what it was, then she raised her eyes to his. “You completely confound me. I don’t understand you.”
“No way you could. Don’t even try.”
“You went there expressly to fight them.”
“Yes. And I think they were expecting me. Norman was asleep in the recliner, but he had the shotgun across his lap.”
“He could have killed you.”
“He didn’t react fast enough.”
“You said something to him. You said he only thought he’d missed the excitement in Virginia. What were you talking about?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“It does concern me! I watched two men get beaten to within an inch of their lives.”
“They had it coming.”
“Perhaps for Lisa, but—”
“Let it go, Doc.”
“Give me something.” Her voice had cracked on that. “Some explanation.”
The silver trinket had burned like a live coal deep inside his jeans pocket. She still hadn’t missed it. It was too small and worthless for her even to have noticed it was gone, but it was a treasure to him. Part of her, now his.
Wasn’t it only fair that he give her something in return? But what she’d asked for—an explanation—he couldn’t give.
After a long moment of silence, tears had welled in her eyes. “Who are you?” By her tone, he’d known that she was demanding to learn more than his name.
He’d turned away and looked out the windshield, wanting like hell to touch her just one more time, to feel her mouth open and soft under his. But if he had, it would have been harder to let her go.
So he called up the numbness with which he armed himself to get through each day. When he’d reached across her again, it was to pull the door handle. He opened it with a shove. “Bye, Doc.”
She continued to look at him with incomprehension. He kept his expression shuttered. Eventually, she’d climbed down out of the truck and closed the door. He’d driven away.
He guessed she’d done what he’d asked and hadn’t called anyone immediately because it was a good hour before the news bulletin came in over his truck’s radio that she’d been recovered.
He was taking a huge gamble by returning to town. She could have given the authorities the make and model of his truck. Maybe she had even memorized the license plate number and handed it over.
But he didn’t think she’d give him away, not particularly because she wanted to protect him, but to protect herself from scandal and embarrassment. The more she told about him, the more she would have to reveal about herself and their time together, and he didn’t believe she would publically divulge that.
But he wondered how much she would tell her husband in private.
The potbellied deputy who’d helped her alight was joined by another who’d been riding shotgun in the SUV. They flanked her, protecting her as they made shuffling progress through the throng toward the entrance to the ER. She kept her head down, her face averted from cameras. She didn’t even glance his way.
If she did happen to see him, would she point him out and accuse him of being her captor? Or would she pretend that he was just another face in the crowd, a face she didn’t know, one she hadn’t kissed, clasped to her breasts, pressed between her thighs as she came?
He would never know because she didn’t look his way before being ushered through the automatic double doors and out of sight. He continued to stare at the empty space where he’d caught his final glimpse of her until the crowd of onlookers began to disperse, eddying around him as he stood rooted to the spot.
News teams began ambling back toward their vans. Then a shout went up. “Mr. Charbonneau! Mr. Charbonneau!” And suddenly he was being buffeted by reporters and cameramen as they rushed past him back toward the SUV.
Climbing from the backseat was Emory’s husband, easily recognizable from pictures of him on the Internet. Having been identified, Jeff Surrey was now surrounded by media. A sound bite from him was the next best thing to one from Emory.
Jeff ran slender fingers through his fine, fair hair as though preparing himself to appear on camera. He was dressed in dark slacks, a turtleneck, and a black quilted puffer jacket more suited to a ritzy ski resort than to a rural town in the foothills.
“It’s Surrey,” he said into the first of many microphones thrust at him. “My name is Jeff Surrey.”
“Is your wife okay?”
“Has she told you what happened?”
“Where has she been, Mr. Charbonneau?” asked one, who’d missed or ignored his corrective disclaimer.
Jeff held up his hand for quiet. “Presently, I know little more than you do. A short while ago, Emory called me from a service station on the edge of town. As it so happened, I was with personnel from the sheriff’s office when I got the call. I, along with Sergeant Detectives Knight and Grange, rushed to the site immediately.”
Questions were hurled at him, but the one he addressed was why Emory had been brought to the hospital. “She has suffered a concussion. Self-diagnosed. Other than that, she appears not to have any serious injuries, but I insisted that she be brought here and examined to make certain of her condition.”
In response to the next barrage of questions, he said, “It’s my understanding that a representative from the sheriff’s office will conduct a press conference at the appropriate time, after officers have had a chance to talk to Emory at length. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He began pushing his way through them.
As Jeff Surrey neared the hospital entrance, he came within ten feet of the tall man in the watch cap, who felt nothing but contempt for the one in the slick ski jacket. He’d quickly formed an opinion of Emory’s husband. He was a vain, smug bastard, full of self-importance. What had she ever seen in him?
Trying to find an answer, he closely scrutinized Jeff from head to—
His heart
clutched, then went stone cold. Inside his head a clamor began. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!
But he remained silent and dead still and let Jeff Surrey walk past, never guessing the avalanche he’d incited. Arrogance intact, Emory’s husband strode into the ER. The glass doors slid closed behind him.
In them, the reflection of a man appeared. He saw himself, gloved hands clenched into fists at his sides. His jaw granite, his stance combative, a stag eager to butt heads, a gunslinger itching to draw. He looked fearsome even to his own eyes.
And he realized how conspicuous that would make him if he lingered.
He hovered on the brink of indecision for a few seconds more, then turned away from the building. He hunched his wide shoulders inside his coat and merged with a group of volunteers who were discussing the miracle of Emory’s survival, the fortunate outcome that just as easily could have been disastrous, and the relief her husband must be feeling to have her back safe and sound.
He peeled off from the group without ever being noticed and walked the several blocks to where he’d left his pickup in a busy supermarket parking lot. He got in but sat behind the steering wheel, banging it with his fists and swearing.
He’d thought that when he’d said good-bye to her, he had cut himself free, that he could move on, adrift and unhappy, but at peace for knowing that he’d done the right thing.
Hardly.
* * *
Jack Connell awakened hopeful that morning. But one glance out his hotel room window, and he knew he wouldn’t be completely drying out anytime soon. The rain continued. In torrents. He couldn’t even see the marina across the street through the downpour.
It took him ten minutes to shower, shave, and dress. Twenty more, and he was back on the street where Rebecca Watson lived. He parked at the opposite end of the block from where he’d been yesterday.
He’d seen Rebecca only that once, when she came out onto the porch to get her mail. He never caught sight of her daughter, Sarah.