The Last Honest Woman

by Nora Roberts

  the pan.

  "I thought you'd have a staff."

  "A staff of what?" She broke the second egg, then glanced over. Abruptly, nerves gone, she laughed. "A staff? As in maid and cook and so on?" Delighted, she shook her hair back, then gave the eggs her full attention. "Where in the world did you get an idea like that?"

  Automatically he turned on the tape recorder. "Rockwell was wealthy, you were his heir. Most women in your position would have a servant or two."

  She remained facing the stove so that her face was curtained by her hair. "I don't really care to have people around. I'm here most of the time; it'd be silly to have someone dusting around me."

  "Didn't you have a staff before your husband died?"

  "Not here. In Chicago." She scooped up his eggs. "That was before and right after Ben was born. We lived in a suite in his mother's house. She had a full staff. Chuck traveled a great deal, and we didn't really have a family yet, so we hadn't decided where to settle."

  "His mother. She didn't approve of you."

  Abby set the plate in front of him without a tremor. "Where did you hear that?"

  "I heard all sorts of bits and pieces. It's part of the job. It couldn't have been easy living in Janice Rockwell's home when she didn't approve of the marriage."

  "I don't think it's fair to say she didn't approve." Abby went back for coffee, choosing her words carefully. "She was devoted to Chuck. You probably knew she raised him alone when her husband died. Chuck was only seven then. It isn't easy raising children without a partner."

  "You'd know about that."

  She sent him an even look. "Yes, I would. In any case, Janice was very protective of Chuck. He was a dynamic, attractive man, the kind who attracted women. On the circuit, there are all manner of groupies hovering around."

  "You weren't a fan."

  "I never followed racing. We were always traveling around, playing in clubs and so forth. I didn't even know who Chuck was when we first met."

  "Hard to believe."

  She poured coffee into two cups on the counter. "Janice thought so, too."

  "And resented you."

  Abby took a calming sip of coffee. "Your job isn't to put words in my mouth, is it?"

  She wasn't going to be easy to shake. It seemed to him that she had her answers down pat. Too pat. "No. Go on."

  "Janice didn't resent me personally. She would have resented any woman who took Chuck away from her. It's only natural. In any case, I think we got along well enough."

  Though he intended to dig a bit deeper there, he let it pass for now. "Why don't you tell me how you met Rockwell?"

  That was easy. She could talk about that without hedging. "We were playing-my family and I-in a club in Miami. My parents did this little comedy routine and a couple of songs. Then my sisters and I ran through our bit-show tunes with a sprinkling of popular music. God, the costumes-" She broke off, laughing, then began to set the kitchen to rights as she talked. "Anyway, we did bring some business in. I always thought Chantel was responsible for that. She was stunning, and though she never had Maddy's range, she could sell a song. The race brought the drivers into town, the mechanics, backers, groupies. We always had a pretty good crowd.''

  He watched her move around the kitchen with a smile on her face as though she were amused by the memory. "Every night Pop had to ward men off who wanted to ah- see Chantel home. Then one night Chuck walked in with Brad Billinger."

  "Billinger's retired now."

  "He quit racing after Chuck was killed. They were close. Very close. I haven't seen him in a couple of years now, but he always sends the boys something on their birthdays and for Christmas. As soon as they sat down at a table, there was a lot of noise and confusion, right during the middle of a set. You get used to that kind of thing in clubs and have to know how to handle it. Noise, hecklers, drunks."

  "I can imagine."

  "Pop had delegated me to deal with that kind of problem when the three of us were on because Chantel tended to lose her temper and Maddy had a habit of walking right offstage until things calmed down again. So I leaned into the mike and made some joke, something about our next number being so dangerous that we needed absolute quiet. They didn't pay a lot of attention, but we kept on. Then we went into 'Somewhere,' from West Side Story. Do you know it?"

  "I've heard it." Dylan leaned back and lit a cigarette. Eighteen, and handling drunks and hecklers. She couldn't be as soft as she looked.

  "I looked over to where most of the noise was still coming from, and Chuck was looking right at me. It was an odd feeling. When you perform, people watch, but they rarely really look at you. At the break Chantel made a comment about Superdriver staring at me. That was the first inkling I had of what Chuck did for a living. Chantel was always reading gossip columns."

  "Now she's in them."

  "She loves every minute of it."

  After searching through the kitchen drawers, Abby came up with the lid of a mason jar for Dylan to use as an ashtray. "Sorry, I don't have anything else."

  "Chris has already given me your views on smoking. So it was love at first sight?"

  "It was-" How did she explain? She'd been eighteen, and naive in ways the man sitting in her kitchen would never understand. "You could call it that. Chuck stayed until the last set was over, then came back and introduced himself. Maybe part of the attraction for him was that I really didn't know he was someone I should be impressed with. He was very polite and asked me to dinner. It was after midnight and he asked me to dinner."

  She smiled again. She'd been so young and, like Chris, so gullible. "Of course, Pop wouldn't hear of it. The next afternoon there were two dozen roses delivered to the motel where we were staying. Pink roses. Nothing that romantic had ever happened to me. And that night he was back again. He kept coming back until he'd charmed my mother, persuaded my father and infatuated me. When he left Miami for the next race, I left with him. And I had his ring on my finger."

  She glanced down. Now it was bare. "Life's a funny thing, isn't it?" she murmured. "You never know what trick it's going to pull next."

  "How did your family feel about you marrying Chuck?"

  She pulled herself back to the business at hand. Give him enough, Abby reminded herself. Just don't give him everything. "You'd have to understand that my family rarely all think the same thing about anything. My mother cried, then altered her wedding dress to fit me even though we were married by a justice of the peace. Pop cried, too. After all, he was marrying me off to a stranger, and his act had just been shot to hell." Picking up an apple, she polished it absently on her sleeve. "Maddy said I was crazy, but that everyone deserved to do something crazy now and then. And Chantel-" She hesitated.

  "Chantel what?"

  It was time, she felt, for caution again. "Chantel's the oldest of the three of us-two and a half minutes older than me, but that still makes her big sister. She didn't think Chuck, or anyone, was good enough. She had plans to have a great many love affairs, and decided I was blowing my chance to have them, too." With a laugh, she bit into the apple. "If you believe everything you read, Chantel's had so many love affairs she's lucky to be alive. Trace didn't hear about the wedding until, oh, three or four months later. He sent me a crystal bird from Austria."

  "Trace- that's your brother. Older brother. I don't have much information on him."

  "Who does? I doubt it matters in this case, really. Trace never even met Chuck."

  Dylan made a note anyway. "From there, you hit the circuit. Some might call it an odd sort of honeymoon."

  In some ways, that entire first year had been a honeymoon. In other ways, there'd been no honeymoon at all, no solitary time for settling in and learning. "I'd traveled before." She shrugged. "I was born traveling, literally. Pop got my mother off a train in Duluth and to a hospital twenty minutes before she gave birth. Ten days later we hit the road again. Until this place, I'd never lived in one spot for more than six months at a time. You follow one circuit or y
ou follow another."

  "But the Grand Prix's more exciting."

  "In some ways. But like performing, there's a lot of sweat and preparation for a few minutes in the spotlight."

  "Why did you marry him?"

  She looked back at him. Her eyes were calm enough, but he thought her smile was just a little sad. "He was a knight on a white charger. I'd always believed in fairy tales."

  CHAPTER Four

  She wasn't being honest with him. Dylan didn't need a lie detector to know that Abby veered away from the truth every time they talked. When she veered, she did so calmly, looking him straight in the eye. Only the slightest change in her tone, the briefest hesitation, tipped him off to the lie.

  Dylan didn't mind lies. In fact, in his work he expected them. Reasons for them varied-self-preservation, embarrassment, a need to gloss over the image. People wanted to paint themselves in the best light, and it was up to him to find the shadows. A lie, or more precisely the reason for the lie, often told him more than a flat truth. His background as a reporter had taught him to base a story on fact, corroborated fact, then leave judgment to the reader. His opinion might leak through, but his feelings rarely did.

  His main problem with Abby was that he'd yet to satisfy himself as to her motivation. Why lie, when the truth would undoubtedly sell more books? Sensationalism was more marketable than domestic bliss. She hadn't reached the point where she portrayed her marriage as idyllic, but she certainly had managed to skim over problem areas.

  And there'd been plenty of them.

  Alone in his room with only the desk lamp to shed light, Dylan took out a stack of tapes. A glance at this watch showed that it was just past midnight. The rest of the house was long since in bed, but then, regular hours had never been a part of his life. Schedules and time frames boxed a man in. Dylan didn't like walls unless he built them himself. He could work through the day if he chose, or he could work through the night, because hours didn't matter. Only the results.

  The house was quiet around him, with only a faint wind scraping at the windows. He might have been alone-but he was aware, maybe too aware, that he wasn't. There were three people in the house, and he found them fascinating.

  Chris and Ben, Dylan recalled sympathetically, had gone to their rooms after a firm scolding and a few tears. Using their mother's best china to feed the dog hadn't been the smartest move they could have made. She hadn't lifted a hand to them or even so much as shouted, but her lecture and disapproval had had both boys' chins dragging on the ground. A nice trick. Though it amused him, Dylan pushed the whole business aside. He had work to do, and a woman to figure out.

  He'd already interviewed several people about Chuck Rockwell. Opinions and feelings about the man were varied, but none of them were middle-of-the-road. The one firm fact Dylan had picked up was that people had either adored Rockwell or detested him. Dylan picked up the tape marked Stanholz and turned it over in his hand.

  Grover P. Stanholz had been Chuck's original backer, a wealthy Chicago lawyer with a love of racing and personal ties to the Rockwells. For ten years he'd played father, mentor and banker to Rockwell. He'd seen the young driver go from an eager rookie to one of the top competitors on the circuit. Just over a year before his death, Stanholz had pulled the financial rug out from under his famous prot‚g‚.

  Thoughtful, Dylan slipped the tape into the recorder and ran it nearly to the end. It only took him a moment to find the spot he was looking for.

  "Rockwell was a winner, a money-maker and a friend." Dylan's own voice came through the speaker, low and distinct. Automatically he turned the volume down so that the sound reached no farther then the end of his desk. "Why, when he was favored to win the French Grand Prix, did you pull out as his backer?"

  There was a long silence, then a rustling sound. Dylan remembered that Stanholz had drawn out a cigar and taken his time unwrapping it. "As I explained, my interest in Chuck wasn't simply financial. I had been a close friend of his father's, was a friend of his mother's." There was another silence as Stanholz lit his cigar. "When Chuck started out, he was already a winner. You could see it in his eyes. The beauty was, he had a tremendous love and respect for the sport. He was- special."

  "How?"

  "He was going straight to the top. Whether I had backed him or he'd had to scramble to find the money to race, he was going to the top."

  "Couldn't he have used the Rockwell money?"

  "To race?" Stanholz's laugh came as a wheeze over the tape. "Chuck's money was tied up tight in trust. Janice adored that boy. She'd have never released the money so he could drive at 150 mites an hour. Believe me, she fried me for doing it, but the boy was hard to resist." It came on a sigh, wistful, regretful. "Men like Chuck don't come along every day. Racing takes a certain arrogance and a certain humility. It takes common sense and a disregard for life and limb. It's a balance. He was devoted to his profession and eager to make a name for himself. I've always wondered if the trouble was that he won too much too soon. Chuck began to see himself as indestructible. And unaccountable."

  "Unaccountable?"

  There was another pause here, a hesitation, then a quiet sigh. "Whatever he did, however he did it, was all right, because of who he was. He forgot, if you can understand what I mean, that he was human. Chuck Rockwell was on a collision course with himself. If he hadn't crashed in Detroit, he'd have done so elsewhere. I felt pulling out as his backer might give him something to think about."

  "What do you mean, he was on a collision course with himself?"

  "Chuck was racing his own engine. Sooner or later he was going to burn out."

  "Drugs?"

  "I can't comment on that." It was a lawyer's voice, dry and flat.

  "Mr. Stanholz, it's been rumored that Rockwell had been using drugs, most specifically cocaine, for some time before his fatal crash in Detroit."

  "If you want that substantiated, you'll have to go elsewhere. Chuck didn't die an admirable man, but he'd had his moments. I remember them."

  Unsatisfied, Dylan stopped the recorder. It was a non-denial at best. He had substantiated through others who'd refused to go on record that Chuck Rockwell had developed a dangerous dependence on drugs. But he'd been clean during the last race. The autopsy had determined that. In any case, that was only one area. There were others.

  The next tape was marked Brewer. Lori Brewer was the sister of the man who had been Rockwell's backer during his last year. The divorced former model was by her own admission a woman who liked men who took risks. Rockwell's wife hadn't been in the stands during his final race. But his mistress had.

  Dylan put in the tape and pushed the play button.

  "-the most exciting, dynamic man I've ever known."

  Lori's voice had the low-key sensuality of the South. "Chuck Rockwell was a star, fast and hot. He knew his own worth. I admire that in a man."

  "Ms. Brewer, for nearly a year you'd been Rockwell's constant companion."

  "Lover," she corrected. "I'm not ashamed of it. Chuck was as devastating a lover as he was a driver. He did nothing by half measures." She gave a low, warm-sugar laugh. "Neither do I."

  "Did it bother you that he was married?"

  "No. I was there, she wasn't. Look, what kind of a marriage is it when people only see each other three or four times a year?"

  "Legal."

  He remembered she'd taken that good-naturedly enough, her only response a shrug. "Chuck was planning to divorce her anyway. The problem was that she had a stranglehold on his bank account. The lawyers were negotiating a settlement."

  Dylan turned off the tape with a muttered oath. Not once during any of his conversations with Abby had she mentioned divorce. There was always the possibility that Rockwell had lied to Lori Brewer. But then, Dylan didn't believe the very sharp Ms. Brewer would have been duped for long. If divorce proceedings had been underway, Abby was doing her best to cover it.

  Dylan hadn't pushed the point yet, nor had he brought up Lori Brewer. He
was aware that once he did she would probably look at him as the enemy. Whatever he got out of her after that point would have to be pried out. So he'd wait. What he wanted from Abby had to be won through patience.

  He pushed aside tapes of other drivers, mechanics, other women, and chose the one marked Abby. It didn't occur to him that out of all the tapes he had, hers was the only one not marked with just a last name. He'd stopped thinking of her as Mrs. Rockwell. The tape was from this morning, when he'd cornered her in the living room. She'd been folding laundry, and it had occurred to him that he hadn't seen anyone do that quiet, time-consuming little chore in more years than he could count. There'd been an old fifties record on the stereo, and the doo-wops and the sha-la-las had poured out as she'd sorted socks.

  He remembered how she'd looked. Her hair had been pulled back in a ponytail so that her cheekbones stood out with subtle elegance. The collar of a flannel shirt had poked out of the neck of an oversize sweatshirt, leaving the curve and line of her body a mystery. She'd worn thick socks and no shoes. The fire had been crackling behind her, flames curling greedily around fresh logs. She'd looked so content and at peace with herself that for a moment he hadn't wanted to disturb her. But he'd had a job to do. Just as he had one to do now. Dylan pushed the play button again.

  "Did racing put a strain on your marriage?"

  "You should remember, Chuck was a driver when I married him." Her voice on the tape sounded calm and solid after Lori Brewer's honey-laced one, "Racing was part of my marriage."

  "Then you enjoyed watching him race?"

  There had been a lengthy pause as she'd given herself time to find the right words. "In some ways I think Chuck was at his best behind the wheel, on the track. He was exciting, almost eerily competent. Confident," she added, looking beyond Dylan into her own past. "So confident in himself, in his abilities, that it never occurred to me he would lose the race, much less lose control."

  "But after the first eight or nine months you stopped traveling with your husband."

  "I was pregnant with Ben." She'd smiled a little as she'd pulled a small, worn sweater out of the basket. "It became difficult for me to jump from city to city, race to race. Chuck was-" And there it was, Dylan noted, that slight variance in tone. "He was very understanding. It wasn't too long after that that we bought this place. A home base. Chuck and I agreed that Ben, then Chris, needed this kind of stability."

  "It's hard to picture a man with Chuck Rockwell's image settling down in a place like this. But then, he didn't settle, did he?"

  She had very carefully folded a bright red sweatshirt. "Chuck needed a home port, like anyone else. But he also needed to race. We combined the two."

  Evasions, Dylan thought as he stopped the tape. Half-truths and outright lies. What game was she playing? And why? He knew her well enough now to be certain she wasn't stupid. She would have known of her husband's infidelities, and most particularly of his relationship with Lori Brewer. Protecting him? It hardly seemed feasible that she would protect a man who'd cheated on her, and one who'd cheated blatantly, in public, without a semblance of discretion.

  Was she, had she been, the kind of woman content to stay in the background and keep the home fires burning? Or was she, had she been, a woman with her eye on the main chance?

  And what kind of man had Rockwell been? Had he been the egotistical driver, the generous lover or the understanding husband and father? Dylan found it hard to believe any man could be all three. Abby was the only one who could give him the answers he needed.

  Dragging a hand through his hair, he pushed away from the desk. He wanted to get something down on paper. Once he did, he might begin to put it all in some sort of perspective. Dylan looked at his typewriter and the tapes. Coffee, he decided. It was going to be a long night.

  There was a low light burning in the hall. Automatically he glanced across the corridor to where Abby slept Her door was partially open, and the room was dark. He had an urge to cross over and push the door open a little wider so he could see her in the light from the hall.

  What did he care for her privacy? He poked and scraped at her privacy whenever he questioned her. She'd cashed a check that gave him permission to.

  No, he didn't give a damn for her privacy. But his own self-preservation was a different matter. If he looked, he'd want to touch. If he touched, he might not be able to pull back. So he turned from her room and started down the stairs, alone.

  The fire in the living room was burning low and well. He'd watched Abby bank it one night and had been forced to admit that she did a better job of it than he would have. He left it alone and walked down the hall to the kitchen.

  She was sitting at the bar in the dark. The only light came from the kitchen fire and the half-moon outside. She had her elbows on either side of a cup, her chin propped by both hands. He thought she looked unbearably lonely.

  "Abby?"

  She jumped. It might have been funny if he hadn't seen just how white her face was before she focused on him.

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."

  "I didn't hear you come down. Is anything wrong?"

  "I wanted coffee." But instead of going to the stove, he went to her. "I thought you were in bed."

  "Couldn't sleep." She smiled a little and didn't, as he'd expected, fuss with her hair or the lapels of her robe. "The water's probably still hot. I just made tea."

  He slid onto the stool beside her. "Problem?"

  "Guilt."

  His reporter's instincts hummed, at war with an unexpected desire to put his arm around her and offer comfort. "About what?"