Stay (Dunham series #2)

by Moriah Jovan

  GO TO THIS

  There were very few things in which he brooked no argument and she knew from experience that this would be one of them. She nearly told him where to shove it, but his head would explode and that would not be pretty.

  Knox’s motives bothered her. He never had just one reason for anything he did and he almost never explained himself beforehand, so she could only assume he had put some scheme into motion that involved more than simply attending a funeral.

  Well. If he had any bright ideas about using Simone’s death to force Vanessa back to Chouteau County so Eric could conveniently run into her, then she would make sure that backfired on him.

  There were ways around Knox Hilliard.

  When she’d finished packing a duffle and garment bag, she clattered down the stairs and out the front door of her cottage. She had packed carefully, as she had very little trunk room and absolutely nowhere to hang her garment bag. She briefly considered hitching the trailer to her car, but then decided that wouldn’t be necessary for a short stay in a town where she wouldn’t be socializing.

  Had to be on a weekend, too.

  Dammit.

  Well, better now, in April, than June, she supposed. Whittaker House had no guests other than her permanent residents. Nash had holed himself up in his suite for the past week “to work,” he said (whatever that meant), and would not tolerate disruptions other than room service. Her only concern was for Friday and Saturday dinner and how her absence would affect the mood of the diners who came as much for Vanessa’s celebrity as her food.

  She went to her office to make a to-do list for Knox, hoping he could plow through some of it.

  “Damn,” she muttered when she checked her calendar. “He’ll have to go to that zoning meeting by himself if I’m not back.” That wouldn’t earn her any points with the zoning board, considering a special meeting of the county government had to be called every time Vanessa wanted to do so much as plant a daisy. Everyone loved Knox, true, but Vanessa was the face of and driving force behind Whittaker House; the next thing she wanted to do would affect a lot of people—and a lot of those people didn’t want things to change.

  “Shit.”

  At the end of the drive, she waited for traffic to clear off the highway. Looking in her rearview mirror, she was struck again with the stately, elegant beauty of her home, her life’s work, her vision come to thriving and prospering life.

  She will always be part of my life and I am grateful to her every day for what she did for me.

  Vanessa clenched her teeth. “So help me, if this is about what happened in January . . . ” she muttered as she pulled off her property.

  Chouteau City, Missouri, the Chouteau County seat.

  She’d left it at sixteen, emancipated, graduated, matriculated, and headed for Indiana. She hadn’t been back to it in years and would never have gone back but for Knox’s imperious command.

  Vanessa’s mood did not improve during the four-hour drive northward. She made phone calls to her allies on the county commission to warn them that she might not be able to make the zoning hearing Wednesday. She couldn’t estimate how long she’d be gone, but there were going to be a lot of unhappy people around the Ozarks, and she would hear every syllable of it, loudly and with much repetition.

  “I might as well have gone to the wedding,” she snarled at no one. Her jaw clenched tighter and tighter as she neared her exit and then there it was: Chouteau City.

  She sucked in a tortured breath as she zipped through town to a motel close to the courthouse. Once she’d parked and sat for a moment, hearing her engine click as it cooled, she allowed one moment of indulgence to wonder what he was doing right this very minute.

  * * * * *

  9: Tipping Point

  “I think I’m going to lose my mind, right this very minute,” Eric muttered to himself as he surveyed the chaos of his dojo, crammed with students and their parents. How had he lost control of his life so fast? Knox had been gone a mere four months, and already Eric was in over his

  head. He looked at the clock; only half an hour to go before it would be time to close up shop and go back to the courthouse for the rest of the evening.

  “EricEricEric!” squealed six little girls as they scrambled toward him. Dressed identically in white karate gis, their waists wrapped with little white and yellow belts, they jockeyed for position around him, which was kinda cute in a kitten sort of way.

  “Yes, ladies?” he asked gravely, giving them his full attention. Kids. What a mess.

  Too bad teaching kids’ karate was as close as he would ever get to being a father. He regretted that a bit.

  “Will you come see us in our school program Saturday night?”

  He pretended to consider that and watched them get antsier and antsier as he dragged his thinking out. “Well,” he said, wondering if Annie would blow her top, “I’ll have to check my calendar, but it’s a possibility.”

  They all bounced up and down and squealed yet again. He supposed that in the world of ten-year-old girls, that was as good as a yes. Which, in this case, it was, and they knew that as well as he did. The six of them damn near knocked him on his ass with their enthusiastic hugs, then they bolted off to tell their parents that Sensei Eric would grace the hallowed halls of Chouteau Elementary with his presence come Saturday.

  “Dude, you can’t keep this up,” said his partner as he brushed past Eric with gloves, foot pads, and other assorted equipment on his way to the back room.

  Eric said nothing. His business was going to go down the tubes if he didn’t change something and fast. “Hey,” he called finally as he followed Dirk into the back. “What if we changed up our hours?”

  “To what? Sunday between one and one-thirty in the morning? Because that’s about how much time you seem to have.”

  Dirk tossed foot pads in their bin. Once that was done, they began working together to put the rest of the equipment away.

  “I’ve only been in that office for three months. Four if you count the interim. It’ll shake out.”

  “That’s all it takes for some of these kids’ parents to get nasty. Too bad you can’t quit your job.”

  Eric grunted.

  “How did Knox do it?”

  “Knox had a bad case of insomnia, that’s how he did it. Well. Until he started sleeping with Justice, that is; after that, things started slipping. And I don’t have a photographic memory.”

  “How did you do it when Knox was in the hospital?”

  “Dirk, think about that a minute. It was December. How much does your office have to do between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, especially considering county government pretty much shut down waiting for news on Knox?”

  Dirk stopped what he was doing and looked at Eric as he wiped the sweat from his dark brown brow. “Point taken. But now it’s April and you’re drowning and it’s time to figure something out. It might not matter so much if the economy weren’t kicking our butts, but it is and these people pay for you.”

  Eric’s lips pressed together. “You know, maybe they’re going to have to deal with it. Twelve classes, six classes each kids and adults—and every one of those people knows where I work. Why should any reasonable person expect me to teach every single one of them and do my job?”

  “Yeah, but we both have staff—and they know that, too. They expect the bosses to be able to cut and run when they need to.”

  “You’re fully staffed. I have exactly six attorneys—one of whom is a new grad and another who is moving to Provo in a month. I should have ten attorneys and I still don’t have any secretaries. I just don’t have time, Dirk. I’m too busy hauling water to dig a well.” He paused, then grumbled, “I barely have time to kiss Annie goodnight.”

  Dirk very pointedly said nothing, which said everything. Eric sighed. “Well. I do have one trick up my sleeve. If she’ll agree to it.”

  “Who?”

  “Giselle Kenard. She’s a black belt and she trained with Mill, same
as us.”

  Dirk grunted and walked back out to the dojo floor. “Won’t make a bit of difference, though, if you’re not here—and that’s the bottom line.”

  Eric said nothing. Dirk directed his two oldest children to start on their dojo chores, then Eric and Dirk went to take their places in front of the class of adults who were just finishing up. Their highest-ranking student had taught the entire class (no one seemed to mind who taught as long as Eric was actually in the building during class), but stepped aside to allow the owners to close the session. Eric and Dirk dropped into meditation stance, at which point, so did everyone else. Finally, they straightened, stood at attention and Eric bellowed, “What style are we?!”

  “Kenpo!” The roar of twenty adults reverberated through the studio. Eric and Dirk bowed.

  Class dismissed. Eric had to get back to work—and he had a lot of it to get done.

  “Oh, hey,” Dirk said once he’d corralled his kids and locked up, heading out into the chill of an early spring night. “You going to Simone Whittaker’s funeral?”

  “What the hell do you think?”

  “You might want to go just to make sure she’s really dead.”

  He’d seriously considered that. “Trust Simone to get herself killed in a bar brawl in Raytown. Are you going?”

  “Haven’t decided yet,” Dirk said. “I might go just to make LaVon mad, because you know, a black man crashing that redneck party . . . ”

  “A Mormon one. Take your wife with you. That’d be hilarious.”

  “Funny thing is, I’ve defended half those blockheads.”

  “And the other half knows you’ll end up defending them eventually, too.”

  Dirk burst out laughing.

  “Speaking of that,” Eric said. “If you do decide to go, be sure to ask Wilson for a recess on the Blakely case.”

  “Yeah, I’m winning and you know it. You’d love that extra day.”

  That was the truth.

  “Well,” Dirk said when Eric didn’t answer. His voice, laced with humor, floated back from the dark as he walked off to his car, one tired child in his arms and the other dragging against him. “Tempted as I am, I guess that’s one funeral I’m not going to—just so you can’t have your extra day.”

  It was, at times, inconvenient to be business partners with a public defender.

  Eric jogged across the street and into the courthouse, up the stairs, and into the office he’d practically lived in for the last three months. He dropped in his chair and dug out a pile of résumés.

  He was not having a good time.

  Eric had assumed that with no façade to keep up, no elaborate schemes going on, no FBI making extra work for him, and no extra legal work to do for Knox, he would have a lighter schedule than he’d had as executive. Considering his managerial style and the fact that he’d been managing the prosecutor’s office since he’d graduated from law school, it should have been a piece of cake.

  Oh, it was a piece of something, all right.

  Knox had never had any patience with bureaucratic paperwork and no compunction about tossing everything in the shred bin; he’d figured if it was that important, someone would come bug him until it got done. He could afford to do that: Nobody was going to walk into Knox Hilliard’s office to tell him to sign this or that or some other thing—except Eric, which was why Knox had hired him, only . . . after about a year of trying to manage Knox with one hand tied behind his back, Eric had finally decided he’d had enough of Knox’s pigheaded bullshit and had started signing Knox’s name to everything himself, daring Knox to say a word about it.

  Knox had smirked and Eric went about doing his boss’s job—except for the massive amounts of paperwork Knox hadn’t bothered to pass along to him at all, thus fell on top of Eric the minute Knox wasn’t around to field it.

  Eric couldn’t count how many times a day in the last three months someone had come to him for help or a signature, but ended the conversation with, “Well, that’s not how Knox did it.”

  Of course it wasn’t. Knox hadn’t done it at all.

  Eric’s resolve not to allow the office to maintain its reputation as a trainer of baby litigators proved difficult, since the law school advisors had disregarded his memo and metro area attorneys either didn’t believe he wanted to hire experienced personnel or didn’t believe Knox had not, in fact, been on the take. More than once he’d heard, “Are you sure there was never anything crooked going on up there?”

  “Not since Knox ousted Nocek, no. Don’t you pay attention to the news?”

  As far as Eric could see, the taint of corruption in Chouteau County might never go away, no matter what he did.

  The Justice McKinley Hilliard test hadn’t worked completely on the sole attorney he’d managed to hire—a new grad—who had correctly answered all of Eric’s pointed questions designed to determine if she could do everything she was given the first day without help.

  Either Eric’s test was flawed or the woman misunderstood how much work he expected her to get through the first day; she hadn’t done badly, really, but she hadn’t performed the way Justice had. As one of her last duties before she left for good, Justice made sure Eric knew she found his expectations unreasonable.

  “You did not assign me that much work my first day.”

  “I did, too. You have selective amnesia.”

  “If you had lived through my first eight weeks in this office, wouldn’t you develop amnesia, too?”

  Eric had to concede that point and took a third of the new attorney’s assigned work off the top. He could breathe a lot easier when she plowed through it with quality work.

  Which also meant Lesley got to pass the “Whittaker Problem” off on the new person, too—

  —until Simone had died Sunday, whose funeral Eric was only too happy to pay for over his mother’s objections.

  “Mom, all the better to plant her as fast as possible, in a casket she can’t get out of. If I have to hot rivet that fucker closed myself, I’ll do that, too.”

  Eric suspected it was a revenge killing for one of the men she’d named in her diary, but he didn’t give a fat rat’s ass if she’d been stabbed on accident, on purpose, or by whom. It was the Jackson County prosecutor’s problem and Eric was just glad she was permanently out of his life.

  He briefly wondered if Simone’s sister would be at the wake tonight or the funeral tomorrow, but then dismissed that. If she hadn’t come back before now, she probably never would, which was fine with him. He didn’t want to look at her or talk to her, especially through the filter of his guilt, embarrassment, regret—whatever it was.

  “Gah.”

  His phone rang then and he looked at the ID. Annie. “Hey, baby,” he said when he answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “Courthouse. Sifting through résumés. Where are you?”

  “In bed, reading. Got a ton of review copies today and I have about four reviews to write and post. Plus, you have not serviced me in days. One more day, and I turn from bitch to überbitch.”

  True enough, and Eric had an equally dire need for some good sex. He looked at his desk and decided work could wait another day. “Okay, let me—”

  “Mister Cipriani!”

  Eric groaned at the sound of that voice from the doorway.

  “Don’t tell me,” Annie said in his ear. “Glenn.”

  “Glenn, I was about to go home and fuck my future First Lady. Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  “No. I have a paper to put to bed.”

  “Shit, Eric, just talk to the little cocksucker. You can service me later.”

  Eric sighed. “All right. Night.”

  “So,” Glenn whined smugly as he settled into the chair across from Eric’s desk. “Tell me about Simone Whittaker.”

  “Are you going to the wake?”

  “Of course. So?”

  “And the funeral?”

  “Eric!”

  “What about her?”

  �
�I want to know who ratted her out and got you off the hook.”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “You said you were going to be transparent. Simone’s dead. LaVon’s still not talking. It’s been fifteen years. What could it hurt?”

  Eric pursed his lips and stared at the little toad, still unable, after all these years, to reconcile himself to looking at a living, breathing stereotype of the Greasy Newspaperman.

  “You covered Knox for fifteen years,” Eric finally said. “You were the one who outed him as the most likely suspect in Parley’s murder. You were the one who broke the story that Knox kicked Nocek’s ass out.” Glenn preened in his chair. “You were the one who found all the ‘evidence’ that Knox was on the take, but you could never prove it. Oh, look. You weren’t any smarter than anybody else was, but you kept your paper alive off him. Bye bye Pulitzer for not catching on to the scam.”

  Glenn’s smugness turned into irritation. “The FBI couldn’t do it and they had all the access in the world. Why would you hold me to a higher standard?”

  Eric grunted. “Well, okay. You got me there. But you have the answer to this problem right under your nose, buried in your own morgue. All you need is about a week, a shitload of caffeine, and some better deductive reasoning skills. I’m sure as hell not doing your job for you, especially on this. Your cash cow went on his merry way smelling like a rose. You can’t dig any more dirt up on me because it doesn’t exist. You’ve turned Annie’s life inside and out and came up with bupkis besides her crazy-ass mother. You better find something pretty sensational to wank over or your little rag’s going to die like the rest of newsprint. I’d politely request that you not reveal this person’s identity just for his or her own safety, but I highly doubt you can figure it out.”

  The man stood with a huff and went to the door, then stopped. “You don’t give me enough credit for what I know versus what I don’t print. I’m a responsible journalist. I back up my facts and then I print them.”