The Summerhouse

by Jude Deveraux

  “I think you’re right,” she said softly. “I think that another time would be better for a visit. I think . . . Tell Valerie . . .” Ellie couldn’t think of any more to say, so she did just what she’d been trying not to do: She turned tail and ran back into the guesthouse and shut the door firmly behind her.

  Twenty-three

  When Ellie made up her mind to do something, it didn’t take her long to start moving. “My strongest point and my weakest,” she’d told Daria. If the decision was good, then great, but if the decision was to leave behind a possible career in art and follow a man . . .

  Anyway, an hour and a half later, she was packed, had made her apologies to Valerie, and was sitting on a bench on the front porch of the summerhouse waiting for a driver to pick up her and her luggage and take her back to L.A. Valerie had said that Woody was sending a plane to fetch some of Lew’s relatives at the airport, so she wouldn’t be causing anyone to make an extra trip. Valerie had been so upset at the news of Lew’s death that she hadn’t paid much attention to what else was going on around her.

  So now Ellie was sitting and waiting. Her daring little escapade had turned into horror—and now she was going back to her own personal nightmare.

  For three years she’d thought about what she’d like to do to that man if she could do it all over again. She’d loved imagining hiring a private eye to stalk her ex. She’d thought long and hard about how she’d hire someone to get close to him and find out where he’d hidden the money he’d stolen from her. She’d spent months, even years, imagining all the things she wanted to do to him.

  But now she was sitting on a cushioned bench, the California mountains were in front of her, and she dreaded having to do any of it. She just plain dreaded it. Years ago when she’d been complaining about her husband to someone, the person had said, “If you don’t like him, why don’t you divorce him?” “Too much trouble,” Ellie had answered instantly.

  Martin loved chaos and confusion. He gained strength from causing misery to other people. But Ellie needed peace and quiet. Only in peace could she think and make up stories and daydream and—

  “Get in.”

  Ellie looked up to see Jessie sitting in an open Jeep that had skidded to a halt in front of her. He was frowning at her as though she was doing something he didn’t like.

  She didn’t obey him. “I’m returning to L.A.”

  “No,” he said. “I need you.”

  At that Ellie blinked. Was this modern courtship? “Maybe you don’t understand that I’m married, and, whether I want him or not, I do have a husband.”

  With a look of annoyance, Jessie leaned across the seat and threw open the passenger door. “Not that way,” he said. “I mean, I do need you like that, but that can wait. Get your damned divorce before I take you if that’s what you want to do, but right now I need your brain.”

  “You’d sure make Madison happy,” Ellie muttered, but she still sat on the bench and didn’t get into the car. “Someone is coming to pick me up. I must return to the city.”

  “No one is leaving the ranch today,” he said. “Sheriff’s orders. He thinks Lew may have been murdered.” Jessie didn’t blink as he watched Ellie’s reaction to his announcement.

  “His wife?” Ellie asked softly.

  Jessie didn’t say anything, just sat there in silence. And Ellie knew that he wasn’t going to tell her anything until she did what he wanted her to do. She wanted to stand her ground and not give in to him, but her writer’s curiosity was stronger than her willpower. With a grimace, she got up, went down the porch stairs, and got into the car. He didn’t speak until they were moving.

  “No,” he said at last. “Not his wife. She was really broken up about his death.”

  Ellie kept her eyes straight ahead. “I see,” she said. She felt Jessie glance at her, but she didn’t look at him. This wasn’t her problem. She had major problems of her own that were going to start very soon. And she had only three weeks.

  As Jessie drove, it occurred to her that she should have asked him where he planned to take her. But he didn’t say and she didn’t ask as he drove down a dirt road. At one point he stopped, got out, opened a gate, then got back into the car and drove through. When he stopped the car on the opposite side of the gate, Ellie was out before he was and she closed the gate behind them.

  “I like useful women,” he said when she was back in the car; then he put the Jeep into gear and kept driving. And Ellie smiled because “useful” is just what she’d liked about him.

  They rode together in silence for a while, and it occurred to Ellie that she should be annoyed with him: he was altogether too sure of himself. He’d known that he could get her to go with him, and he’d assumed—

  Oh, the hell with it, she thought. She’d had too much therapy if she was finding something wrong with being driven down a lonely road by a beautiful man.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked. “To some secret place where you plan to ravish me?”

  He had his eyes on the road, but she could see the tiny smile that came onto his lips. “I thought you wrote murder mysteries,” he said.

  “I do. But they’re also love stories. So where are we going?”

  “Away from everyone,” he said; then he turned a sharp left and they were in the mountains, in the trees, and before them was a beautiful lake. Stopping the car, he looked at her. “I want to know what you know. Tell me everything,” he said; then he got out of the car and walked toward the lake.

  Ellie followed him to where he was now standing at the side of the lake on a wide boulder, throwing rocks and watching them skip across the surface of the water.

  “I listened with my eyes,” he said. “Not my mind. And maybe because of that a good man is now dead.”

  Ellie knew that he wanted to talk, so she sat down on a rock and waited.

  “She’s beautiful, really a knockout,” he said, and Ellie knew that he was talking about Lew’s wife, Sharon. “And I felt sorry for her. She was talented and she said that she was trapped.”

  Pausing, he picked up more pebbles. “She told me that—”

  “She loved Lew so very, very much,” Ellie said in spite of her intention to keep quiet. And she couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “Yes,” Jessie said, then turned to look at her. “How do you know all of this?”

  Now was not the time to go into her own problems. Ellie shrugged. “I’ve been through something similar. Did Lew ever complain about her?”

  “Never. He was proud of her. I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong if Sharon hadn’t told me.”

  “How many others did she bellyache to?”

  “I don’t know. I thought she told only me.” This time it was Jessie who sounded bitter.

  “So what’s this about the sheriff?” Ellie asked.

  For a moment Jessie’s mouth tightened into a straight line. “Me. My big mouth. This morning you made me wonder if Lew really did kill himself, so I said as much to the sheriff. Two hours later he arrested Bowie.” He looked at Ellie. “You remember the man who wanted to kiss you this morning?”

  At first she didn’t know what he meant; then she thought of the cowboy with the beer belly who had puckered up and made everyone laugh. The memory made her smile.

  “That’s Bowie, and he’s been taken in for questioning about Lew’s murder.”

  “What?” she asked. “He didn’t seem like a killer to me.”

  “No, he’s not. But he likes the ladies, and a few years ago there was an unfortunate incident with one of Valerie’s drunken guests. When she sobered up and saw Bowie in daylight, she decided to press charges. Woody had to pull strings and call in a lot of favors to get Bowie off.”

  “So now it’s happening again?” Ellie asked.

  “Not if I can help it!” Jessie said as he threw a rock at the water’s surface. Turning, he looked at her. “So if she murdered him, how do we find out?”

  He was looking at her as th
ough she knew this sort of thing. “Did you tell the sheriff what you know?” she asked.

  “That’s how Bowie got into this mess, isn’t it? If I hadn’t said that I doubted that Lew was as depressed as everyone thought he was, then maybe the sheriff wouldn’t have asked so many questions and found out that Bowie lusts after Lew’s wife in a big way.”

  “I see. And if I hadn’t said anything in the first place . . .”

  “Exactly,” he said. “This is our joint fault. So how do we fix it?”

  It was one thing to write a book about a woman who got herself into jams as she investigated murders but quite another to try something like this in real life.

  Ellie stood up. “Look, this woman may be a killer. I don’t think that I want to stick around for that. I’m on borrowed time here, and I don’t want to change my future so that I return dead.”

  Jessie blinked at her. “You know, sometimes you say really odd things. You talk about things that have yet to happen as though they already have happened. And as though you know the future.”

  “That’s silly,” Ellie said quickly. “How can anyone know the future? It’s just that I—I mean, I—”

  “Go on,” he said. “I’m waiting.”

  “The truth is that I need to get back to L.A. as soon as possible. I have less than three weeks to stop my exhusband—my soon-to-be ex-husband—from taking everything that I’ve earned in writing and giving me a burden of debt for eternity, not to mention taking away my dignity and my self-esteem.”

  “How can you be sure that he’s going to do this?”

  “I know him,” she said.

  “Yes. I can almost believe that’s all there is behind this. You have a good perception of people. You didn’t accept what other people assume to be true about Woody and Valerie. I can tell anyone that she’s a gold digger and they’ll believe me. But you didn’t.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Have you told that lie to many people?”

  “Only women,” he said without a trace of humor. “I want you to stay and help me find out—”

  “You aren’t going to ask me to stay and help you snoop around a murderer, are you?”

  “You don’t know that she is a murderer. And, besides, aren’t your books about some woman who investigates murders?”

  “Do you think that writers experience what they write about? Do you think that Stephen King has lived through everything that he’s written about? When would he write?”

  Jessie grinned. “Okay, it was worth a try. So how about if you have her to lunch, find out what she’ll tell you, and give me time to look through some files? Maybe something was written down.”

  “No, he never wrote anything down,” she said, but of course that had nothing to do with Lew’s wife, Sharon. Ellie put her hands over her face for a second; then when she looked back up at Jessie, she tried to be calmer.

  “Look,” she said. “I’d like to help, but I can’t. I don’t have time. I have to change my own . . . destiny, I guess you’d say. I thought I could afford to take a weekend off and have some fun, but I can tell you that this weekend has turned out to be very much not fun.”

  “All of it?” Jessie asked softly.

  He had those eyes. He had those male eyes that Ellie hadn’t seen in a long, long time. When she’d first met Martin, his eyes were always like Jessie’s were now. Those eyes made every female hormone inside you start to vibrate and . . . and . . . giggle, she thought. Like a silly little girl. Like . . . Well, certainly not like the nearly forty-year-old woman that she was. And not like the mega-successful writer who managed her own career that she was either.

  With all the resolve that she could gather, Ellie turned on her heel and walked away from him. If need be, she’d walk all the way back to the ranch.

  Instantly, Jessie was beside her. “Don’t leave,” he said; then he put his hand on her arm.

  Ellie looked down at his hand. It was strong and brown from the sun, and she could feel the warmth of him through her shirt. Don’t look at him, she told herself. Focus on his hand. Don’t look at him.

  But she did look at him. He still had those eyes, and in the next instant she was in his arms and he was holding her.

  Part of her wanted him to make love to her right there by the lake. She wanted him to take off her clothes and touch her and—

  She was crying! She didn’t know when she started, but she was clinging to him as though he were her life-support system, and she was quietly, but deeply, sobbing. Maybe it was seeing those male eyes of his. Maybe it was being around a man again after all those years of being alone, but all the emptiness of the last years came flooding back to her. She didn’t want to yet again go through that divorce. She didn’t want to have to hear herself accused of cunning and treachery. She didn’t want to hear her sanity questioned.

  Jessie didn’t seem surprised by her tears, and he certainly wasn’t at a loss about what to do. Bending, he swept her into his arms and carried her back to the lake where he sat down on the ground, his back against a tree, and he held her while she cried.

  She didn’t know how long she cried, but it was enough. The shoulder of his shirt was soaked.

  He handed her a clean handkerchief. “Better?” he said softly.

  Blowing her nose, she nodded, and Jessie gently pushed a tendril of hair out of her eyes.

  “Is he trying to kill you?” Jessie asked quietly. “Is that how you know about Lew?”

  With her head bent, Ellie nodded. This was something that had taken her a long time to face. The jealousy and hatred Martin felt toward her was not something that Ellie could comprehend fully. “I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s what he was after. My therapist thinks he was trying to get me to commit suicide. He made me feel like a failure, as though nothing I accomplished meant anything. No matter what I did, according to him, it wasn’t good enough. And he said I had taken away his chance at success. And he tells people that I’m selfish and money-hungry. He spends his life telling people bad things about me.”

  She blew her nose again and took a deep breath. “If I were gone, he’d have the money and his freedom.”

  Jessie pulled her back into his arms so her cheek was on his wet shoulder. She was beginning to recover herself. “I’m sorry I’ve made such a fool of myself, but—”

  “Did anyone believe you?” he asked. “When you told them that he was trying to drive you to suicide, did anyone believe you?”

  “I’ve never told anyone before. You’re the first,” Ellie said, wiping her nose. “People think that if they’ve met a person, he couldn’t be evil. And since my ex spent most of his life telling people how much he loved me, they thought he did love me. Most people aren’t the liar that he is; most people have never met anyone like him.”

  “So poor Lew got pushed past the final step, from suicide to being murdered.”

  When he didn’t say any more, Ellie pulled away from his shoulder to look at him. All in all, they had had a very strange relationship. In one way, they were as physically familiar with each other as longtime lovers, but in another way, they knew nothing about each other.

  “You haven’t given up, have you?” she asked. She was sitting on his lap and his face was inches from hers.

  “Not in the least,” he said matter-of-factly. “But I need your help. I think you know more than you think you do.”

  She moved her legs so she was no longer sitting on his lap; then she stood up, but Jessie continued leaning back against the tree.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “Nothing at all. And neither do you. Maybe she drove him to suicide, or maybe she killed him. But then, maybe she’s a very nice woman and everything happened just as she said it did.”

  “That Bowie went to her house last night and that Lew threatened him with a shotgun?” Jessie asked, his hands behind his head.

  “That’s probably what made her decide to do it now,” Ellie said before she thought, then she put her hand over her mouth.
>
  But Jessie gave a little smile and closed his eyes. “I figure that with all the research that you must have done for those books of yours that you know a great deal about the criminal mind.”

  “I know enough to know that killers are very dangerous people!” she said, but he didn’t open his eyes. In fact, he smiled a bit more.

  And it was in that moment that something clicked in Ellie’s mind. Maybe it was the crying in a man’s strong arms. Maybe it was once again feeling that she was desirable and not just a money-producing machine that Martin had reduced her to.

  Whatever it was, in that second, Ellie gave up her quest for revenge. For three years of her life she had been immobilized by the trauma of what had been done to her and by her ceaseless, never-ending desire for justice.

  But now, she was getting what she wanted: a chance to do it all over again. And now she knew that she wasn’t going to do what she’d planned during those long years of misery. She wasn’t going to return to their home near Los Angeles and spend her every waking minute doing to Martin what he’d done to her. No, she wasn’t going to lower herself to his level.

  The truth was, that the worst had happened to her and she’d lived through it. Back then, everyone involved had agreed that they’d never seen a nastier divorce than hers, and they’d never seen a judge so personally vindictive as hers had been. But, still, Ellie had survived all that had been dumped on her.

  But now she saw that later it hadn’t been the events that had disabled her but her reaction to them. It hadn’t been the loss of the money that she still had to pay to her lazy, lying, philandering ex-husband. It had been Ellie’s self-esteem that had been damaged. Martin had accused her of caring only about herself—and the judge had agreed with him.