The moon was high in the sky when they left the Harrison mansion to head for Pennsylvania. Rockford had spent time in his father’s office, looking for any relevant information that would shed light on what had happened to him, but had found nothing. Giving Thomas instructions to contact him if anything occurred, and with a promise to return the following evening, Rockford and Willow departed.
He followed the little yellow Miata as they traveled, eager to get home to the peace and quiet of his apartment.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. The usually quiet street was illuminated in multicolored flashes from the two police cars that were strategically parked in front of the Victorian house.
“What’s going on?” Rockford exclaimed, jumping from his car.
“What’s happened?” echoed Willow.
“That’s him,” shouted a vaguely familiar voice from the porch. It was one of the detectives from the local precinct they had met when they had been investigating the Burdetts’ truck.
Immediately they were surrounded. Two officers spun Rockford around, pulling his arms behind him, and slapping him into handcuffs.
“What the—” he shouted. “What’s going on?”
“Get off him, you oaf,” Willow yelled, pulling on one officer’s arm.
“Stand back, Miss Blake.” Detective Dunn appeared from the shadows, holding a white envelope. “You don’t want to be more involved in this than you already are.” He turned to Rockford. “You’re under arrest, counselor. I have the warrant right here.”
“Arrest? What are you talking about?”
“You’re under arrest for the murder of your law partner, Mr. Porter Blank, who was found shot to death earlier today in his law office. His records had been rifled, but this was no random robbery. He had over fifty thousand dollars cash in his pocket, untouched. Your fingerprints were found all over the office, all over his files and phone, and the spare office keys which had been stolen, were just located in your apartment.” He held up a plastic bag, and jingled the keys. “You have a right to remain silent. You have a right to an attorney. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-four
The police cars pulled away quickly, lights now extinguished, leaving Willow standing alone on the sidewalk. She took a deep breath, and marched toward his apartment, her mind cranking into gear. She would have to call Georgina, and get help. Her attorney was going to need an attorney. She climbed the steps to Rockford and Georgina’s apartment.
As logic replaced panic, she began to calm down. The charge was ridiculous, and would be quickly dropped, she was sure. After all, Rockford had been miles away in New York all day, witnessed by a zillion hospital personnel.
She hated to call George with more problems, but she took the news without skipping a beat.
“I’ll get my uncle to take care of things, Willow. I’m sure he’ll be out in a few hours. Call me if there’s a problem, but I think it best if I stay here with my mother, who’s determined to hold vigil over dad. No change.”
“I’m so sorry, George.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re there for Rockford, Willow. He needs someone to believe in him, to trust him. There’s something ugly and sinister going on there. We’re going to have to warn him that Slergetti is involved in this somehow, and he’s going to be shocked and upset.”
Willow’s stomach instantly felt like it was filled with angry bees. Rockford knew about Slergetti. . . he had even spoken to him. The bees increased their dance. How was Rockford involved? She kept her unsettled thoughts to herself, not saying a word to George, while trust and fear whirled in a frenzy inside of her.
“I need a favor,” George was saying. “Before you leave the apartment, can you collect the kittens and take them out to the farm? They’ve got to be fed and cared for while I’m away.
Willow agreed.
She gathered up the kittens somberly, getting them ready for their trip to her cottage. The silence in the apartment was deafening. All around her, the contents of the apartment were disturbed, evidence of the police search. Her head was starting to pound.
She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Rockford hadn’t been personally responsible for Porter’s death—but someone had. Someone had shot Porter Blank. That someone was probably named Marco Slergetti. And somehow, that evil man was connected to Rockford. She felt sick at the thought.
Ready to leave, she spotted Rockford’s overturned checkbook on the floor. Automatically, she picked it up and placed it on his desk as she walked by. Three steps later, she froze, then backed up to see what her eye had glimpsed. It was a check stub for a check written three days before, and made out to CASH. The amount of the check had been $60,000.
The tiny flame of hope and trust that she had been fanning in her heart sputtered and died. What had Rockford done with sixty thousand in cash? If corpses could talk, she bet that Porter Blank would know the answer. And the police? They undoubtedly knew too.
She drove the car with the kittens on the seat beside her, their occasional screeches protesting their confinement in the small box. What was Rockford feeling about his confinement in a jail cell? Unwanted, but untamable tears began to flow freely down her cheeks.
In that instant, she knew how much she loved him. Totally and irrevocably. She also knew that she could never forgive or accept his involvement in the ugliness around them. Her principles were set in stone, and were as much a part of her as her skin, her organs, her heart. But her heart. . . it was as if her heart had been captured and catapulted into space to drift forever, alone.
When she arrived home and freed the frantic kittens, they skittered all over the cottage, being critically inspected by her own cats.
She was exhausted. It was after midnight. She had missed her last night’s sleep at the hospital, and had been up frenetically cleaning the barn the night before.
“Don’t worry,” Rockford had said. Fat chance. But there was nothing she could do but wait.
She wrapped herself up in her much-used quilt and curled up in a ball on the couch. Instantly, she was ensconced in furry companions, both large and small. They nestled around her, and the gentle sounds of purrs filled the air.
“I have to think,” she said out loud to herself. “But I’ll just rest for a minute.”
A minute was all it took for her to slip into a deep, desperately needed sleep.
It was a horrible dream. People were dying and missing, Rockford was calling for her, needing her, and she couldn’t do anything to help him. She was tied up, and being slowly tortured with little needles—somewhere a hammer was banging, each blow exploding in her brain as a headache escalated to greater heights. She woke up.
She wasn’t tied up, she was totally entangled in the blanket she had wrapped around herself on the couch. She was covered with . . . kittens. Little furry balls of hungry energy were flexing their tiny claws into any exposed skin they could find.
“Meow!”
“Scat!” She waved an arm and the tiny bodies jumped to the floor. “The U.S. government should hire you guys to do political torture with those claws. Take it easy. Breakfast in a minute.”
She began unwrapping the blanket, trying to ignore her pounding head . . . and her stiff neck. And the hammering, which was still going on.
She jumped up, realizing that the pounding was real. Someone determined was at the door. She opened it cautiously.
Rockford stood there, filling the doorway. His eyes were dark and he look exhausted, his unshaven face shadowed, his clothes disheveled. Her heart leapt in her chest. Without a conscious thought, she threw herself into his arms, holding tight, feeling his heart beating strong in his chest, as he crushed her to him.
“Ah, Willow,” he said softly into her hair. “You’re safe.”
“You’re free. . . .” She nestled against the roughness of his shirt. As her mind cleared, and memory of her tortured resolutions returned, she pulled herself away, horrified at her treacherous attraction to him.
“What ha
ppened?”
“Well, the charges were dropped, as I was obviously out of town. But there were a lot of questions. An attorney dead . . . two people dead in an arson fire . . . two senior citizens missing . . . something very bad is going on around us.”
His words were logical and caring, and his touch had a way of making her crazy. When they had been standing together, their bodies entwined, she felt like they were two halves of a whole. But the truth was . . . they were not. She knew. She knew he had been in contact with Slergetti. She knew he had written a check for $60,000 cash. She knew he had to be involved with the Burdetts’ disappearance . . . with Porter Blank’s death. Her mind was racing with a list of the facts, determined to keep her love-blinded body from reacting to his presence.
It made no difference that she loved him. He had left her and had gone to call Slergetti. She sighed in despair.
He pulled away from her enough to look deeply into her eyes, seeing her anguish. “What is going on here, Willow?”
“You left me, Rockford. You snuck out and took off. . . You are involved with that Marco Slergetti in some way, and maybe in the rest of this. You haven’t been honest with me. I don’t know what to think.” Her voice shook.
His face turned stony at the sound of Marco Slergetti’s name. He did not deny her accusations.
“I left you because I had realized there was something I had to do, Willow. I didn’t want to involve you, Willow. I wanted to find answers. I wanted to keep you safe. I thought you’d trust me, I thought I could trust you.”
The dark eyes were spearing her now. “But you and I have some talking to do, Willow. It seems that when they found my fingerprints all over Porter’s office, they also found another set of unfamiliar prints. They are yours, Wilhemina. When were you at Porter’s desk, using his phone? And more important, why? How are you involved with Marco Slergetti?”
Willow felt as if a fist had clamped down over her heart.
“I am not involved with Marco Slergetti. . . but I do know how awful he is. And I know you’ve called him.”
“Stay out of this, Willow. This doesn’t concern you.”
“According to you. But if he’s got something to do with the Burdetts’ disappearance, then it does concern me. They are my friends, and I feel responsible for whatever’s happened to them.”
“Stay out of it, Willow. Way out.”
His voice was sharp, no sign of that fleeting illusion that Willow had been beginning to call love. She ignored the painful pounding of her broken heart. Keep thinking, keep going, she told herself. No one really dies of a broken heart.
Or so she hoped.
“I wish you’d trust me, Willow,” he said in a low tone. “I wish you’d keep out of this. I don’t want you anywhere near Slergetti.”
Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She wouldn’t let him see her cry.
“I’m sure,” she said calmly, her head held high. “But I won’t stay out of it. For anything. And if you think that I would, you don’t know me at all.”
“Don’t know you? That’s for sure. You turn your love and trust on and off like a water faucet. You change your emotions and commitments as easily as you change your clothes. Who’s the real you, Willow Blake?”
She turned on her heel and headed for the door, her back ramrod straight. She would not let him see how much defying him cost her. She would not let him see her cry.
“Don’t let the door hit you when you leave, buster,” she snarled as she flew out of the cottage and climbed into her Miata with all the class she could muster. Her spinning tires left a trail of dust behind her.
Chapter Twenty-five
It was partly what he loved about her, Rockford realized in frustration, as he watched her drive away. She was proud, and strong, and stubborn, and independent. . . but right now those characteristics made him want to wring her neck.
After kissing her neck . . . He shook his head in frustration. She had no idea.
She had no idea of the evil that emanated from a man like Marco Slergetti. She had no idea how tightly and how treacherously his tentacles had wrapped around society. She had no idea of the number of lives he had wrecked, the number of lives he had controlled during his time as a crime lord. And he couldn’t blame her. Even he, the high-profile defense attorney who had accumulated his court room wins like notches on a football player’s helmet, hadn’t realized the danger of the fire he’d played with in the fateful Slergetti court case that had meant the end of his best friend’s life.
Living the easy life, following directions, and assuming that he was always in the right, he had been somebody’s pawn in a dangerous game. But whose pawn? Peter had been a casualty in that game, and he was determined to give the last breath in his body to be sure that Willow Blake wasn’t the next. Whether she cared or not. Period. He loved her. Maybe he had never really loved anyone before, at least not with this intensity of feeling. But for better or worse, even if she ended up hating his guts, he would love her forever.
He stood at the sink and splashed cold water on his face, shocking himself alert, and rinsing away some of the gritty feeling from his overnight jailhouse stint. His jaw was unshaven and dark. It would have to wait.
He left the cottage at a slow but determined gait, his mind absorbed with planning his next step to protect Willow, and to unravel the mystery of what was going on. Willow would be glad, he thought with half a smile, that the door had actually hit him when he left.
Georgina Harrison had spent many a night sleeping in a chair. When her father’s condition had stabilized, she had insisted that her mother be taken home to rest. She had determined that Rockford’s release was imminent. Then, she had curled up in a little ball in the chair next to her father’s bed, laying her head on the edge of the hospital mattress, and had gone to sleep.
Hushed nurses had come in and out of the room, tending to the elder Harrison’s medical needs, and she had sensed their presence, resting the best she could as long as things seemed uneventful.
But her father’s movement woke her instantly in the early dawn hours. His breathing had changed; she sensed his body had tensed.
“Dad,” she said softly, her face right next to his. “It’s Georgina. I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
“No, no,” he had whispered roughly. “Not okay. For Rockford.”
She swallowed hard.
“Ok, Dad. I hear you. What about Rockford?”
He seemed agitated, his eyes looked wild as he tried to speak. Instinctively, she pushed the nurses’ call button for help. She bent lower.
“Slerghetti,” he whispered, his voice almost like a deep cry. Her heart wrenched at his effort. But he would not stop trying to speak.
“Closer, angel,” he whispered, and she obeyed. She put her ear to his straining mouth and listened with growing horror as he spoke his next words. Then, exhausted, he closed his eyes.
She took his cool, dry hand in hers. “I heard you, Daddy. It will be okay. I’ll take care of everything.” Her voice was calm and reassuring, but inside, she was quaking.
The door of the hospital room swung open, and two nurses rushed in. “Mr. Harrison is awake,” one called in an authoritative voice. “Get the doctor. Quickly.” The other nurse disappeared with the swish of rubber soles on tile. “Sister George,” the nurse continued, “we need to help your father now, if you’ll excuse us.”
George rose to her feet, then bent to place a kiss on her father’s worried brow. “I’m going to find Rockford and Willow now, Daddy. Your job is to get better. Mother will be here soon.”
He opened his eyes again, and looked pleadingly into hers. “Please,” he whispered. “Save Rockford. . . and that Willow, and tell them I’m sorry.”
The nurses took over, and Georgina left quickly, eyes burning, quietly saying a prayer for her father’s recovery. And for Willow and Rockford’s safety. And for her own courage and strength. “Angel,” her father had called her, as he had since she was a precocious toddler.
Well, she was not an angel, but she had a task ahead of her that would take a heavenly miracle to accomplish.
She gunned the engine of her car, and headed for Pennsylvania. She felt like they were going to be up against the devil himself, in the guise of one crazed mobster named Marco Slergetti. She just hoped she wasn’t already too late.
Willow’s head was throbbing and her nerves were jangled when she left the police station later in the day. She had been wrong. So totally and absolutely wrong that it made her heart ache. She had practically accused Rockford Farquahar Harrison III of being involved in the death of Porter Blank . . . of having a relationship with the dangerous Marco Slergetti. . . of having knowledge of the disappearance of the Burdetts.
And then she had stubbornly gone out to prove it. . . determined to prove to herself that she could rid herself of the overwhelming love she had for the man. She had wanted to prove that the instincts that drove her to love and trust him were in error. She had proved, instead, that he was innocent. She had proved that she was not deserving of his love. She had also proved to herself that she loved him beyond distraction, even though she had thrown his love away. It had not exactly been a good day.
The police had been more than helpful. Rockford had been removed from suspicion quickly. His information about Marco Slergetti had given the authorities a direction to begin searching. Slergetti’s organization was disintegrating. He had returned to the country in a desperate attempt to minimize his losses and collect his assets before disappearing for good. Now that they knew who they were looking for, they were certain they would find him.
Unlike Willow, the police had been quick to see that Rockford was one of the good guys.
Everyone knew it. Even the newspapers. Today’s headlines, which she hadn’t seen until late in the day, had excitedly announced the discovery of the identity of the anonymous donor who had started the fund for the aids home with his donation of $60,000. Rockford Harrison was Ryerstown’s hero, it seemed. And maybe her hero, too, except that he would never know it.
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