by Gayle Wilson
“Hello, Elliot,” she answered, smiling at him. She knew the butler would not have forgiven her for what she had done the last time he’d let her in. Not given the degree of affection that had been in his voice for his beloved “Mr. Thorne.”
“Judge Barrington is waiting in the parlor,” Elliot said, pulling the gate inward. “If you’ll follow me.” She could tell from his tone there would be no protective umbrella today and no iced tea. She had definitely not been forgiven.
He said nothing else to her as he led the way up the now familiar walkway and through the glass-paneled front door. The crystal tears of the chandelier in the foyer proclaimed their entrance as they had the first night she’d come to this house. She had expected Elliot to announce her, but instead he disappeared into the darkness behind the central staircase, leaving her alone in the artificial twilight.
This was what she had wanted—an interview with Thorne Barrington, so she didn’t know why she was hesitating. Her palms were clammy, and it had nothing to do with the humidity. Unconsciously, she straightened her shoulders, and taking a deep breath, she pushed aside the sliding wooden door to reveal the formal parlor, exactly as it had been before
Its dimness was a contrast even to the unlighted hall. Enough light seeped in from the porch-shaded glass door there to offer some illumination, but Kate had to pause on the threshold of the parlor to allow her eyes to adjust to its lack of light.
“Ms. August.” The deep voice came from the shadows on the opposite side of the fireplace, the spot where he had been sitting on the first night she’d come here. Gradually, his figure began to take shape, emerging again from the surrounding darkness. And again he was standing—the perfect gentleman.
“Judge Barrington,” she acknowledged his greeting, walking toward him with her hand outstretched. Properly brought up Southern men never extended their hands unless a lady offered hers first. Business women down here knew the rule—a rule that hadn’t changed as far as the old-money crowd, a group to which Barrington certainly belonged, was concerned.
His voice stopped her before she had halved the distance between them. “I no longer shake hands, Ms. August. Please forgive me.” There was no inflection in the statement, no embarrassment, and despite the way it had been phrased, no apology. Simply a statement of fact.
There must have been injuries to his hands, she realized, remembering what Lew had said. Something about how it would change your character to have a bomb blow up in your hands. She hadn’t picked up on the significance of that. The comment had undoubtedly stemmed from some bit of gossip her editor had heard.
Her gaze dropped to Barrington’s hands, to verify that was the reason for the curt dismissal of her attempted handshake. His arms were at his sides, the big hands almost touching the faded denim of well-worn jeans. She could see no details other than the seemingly normal shape of the thumbs and the profile of the rest, palms relaxed, curving slightly inward.
Belatedly aware of the rudeness of what she was doing, she forced her eyes up. His were focused calmly on her face, waiting, his expression absolutely unrevealing. She allowed her own hand to drop to her side. Like an idiot, she had continued to hold it out, even after his comment. All her encounters with this man seemed destined to be mired in embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“Since you’re not at fault, I see no need for you to apologize. Would you like to sit down?”
“Thank you,” Kate said, finding that another chair had been conveniently situated directly across from the shadowed one the judge had chosen. She sat down in it, putting her bag on the floor and fumbling in it for her notebook and a pen, attempting to hide her nervousness. She was aware when Barrington sat down, still moving as gracefully as the athlete he once had been
“You said on the phone that you’d learned some things about the Draper bombing which you wanted to discuss with me,” he said.
That really wasn’t what she had meant to suggest when she’d talked to him. She didn’t know what might be significant about the minutiae of Hall Draper’s very ordinary life. She had just hoped something would trigger a response from the judge.
“I don’t know that I’ve learned anything. Not anything relevant. I just talked to Draper’s widow. I thought if I read you some of the things she told me, you might make a connection.”
“Did you see some connection, Ms. August?”
She smiled, thinking how far removed from the privileged life-style of the Barrington millions Hall Draper had been. How different his growing up. His career.
“You and Draper seem light-years apart to me, but…” She paused, trying to think what she wanted to say, and he waited patiently through the hesitation. “But there must be something. Somewhere in your lives—something in your lives—must connect. It’s the only way to make sense out of all this.”
“You’re still trying to make sense out of what he does?”
“You think he strikes at random?” she asked. This was what she had come for. To finally talk to Thorne Barrington. To get his take on the whole insane situation.
“No,” he said simply.
“Then…” Again she hesitated.
“I think he chooses his victims,” Barrington went on. “But despite the three years I’ve spent thinking about who might hate me enough to…” The break was brief, but there was a tinge of emotion that had not been allowed before. “…want to kill me, I’m no closer to an answer than I was then.”
“What about Mays?” Kate asked. “Did he hate you enough?”
“He hated us all. With all the mad-dog rabidness you’d expect from a man who would blow up a school because a black child had been allowed to enter it. But he didn’t seem to single me out particularly. I was just part of the establishment that had been trying to destroy his mind-set, his way of life, for the past thirty years. He seemed to despise the fellow conspirator who had gone to the authorities far more than those who were attempting to impose a long-overdue justice for what he’d done.”
“But that informant didn’t receive a bomb through the mail.”
“No,” Barrington confirmed.
“Do you think Mays was responsible for the school bombing?”
“Yes,” Barrington said, with a conviction she could hear.
“No doubt in your mind?”
“No.”
“And that’s why you gave him the maximum sentence?”
From out of the shadows came a brief whisper of laughter. Unamused. Self-mocking. “The maximum? A year. Less than a year out of his seventy to pay for the deaths of two children.”
“That was all you could do.” Surprisingly, Kate found herself wanting to comfort that bitterness.
There was no answer from the man in the shadows.
“But you don’t believe he’s Jack?” she asked when he seemed disinclined to pursue the justice, or injustice, of Mays’s sentence.
“Based on everything I know, he doesn’t fit. It bothered me enough—the fact that I’d had personal contact with another bomber—that I did mention Mays to the police. Apparently. they’ve never found a connection.”
“Who did you tell about Mays?” Kate asked, wondering why that information had never been conveyed to Kahler.
“I really don’t know. At first…” The deep voice hesitated, and Kate recognized some trace of emotion, but again the pause was brief and whatever she had heard was gone when he continued. “At first there was only an endless confusion of voices. I never learned to separate them. Thank God, that was a skill I wasn’t forced to acquire.”
Thank God whatever damage there had been to his eyes hadn’t been permanent, Kate realized. That had certainly sounded heartfelt and for the first time she thought about what blindness would have meant to the man Barrington had been. But at least he wouldn’t have been a prisoner in his own home. Maybe what had happened had somehow been worse than the loss of his sight.
“And later on? Did you tell Kahler about May
s?”
“I don’t remember mentioning the school bombing to Detective Kahler. I suppose I assumed that whoever I had told at first had investigated Mays and that the possibility of his involvement had come to nothing. There’s never been any mention of him in anything that’s been written about the mail bombings.”
She wondered suddenly if that meant Barrington had read her stuff. He had been familiar with her name, so even with his disdain for the media, he had still followed the investigation.
“There’s been nothing in my series, because I just heard Mays’s name last week,” she said.
“Who mentioned him to you?”
“A good reporter always protects her sources, Judge Barrington,” she said, smiling. “Or pretty soon she doesn’t have any,” she explained the pragmatism behind that particular ethic.
“Thorne,” he said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“I was simply suggesting that you might use my given name.”
“Of course,” Kate said, her voice almost as breathless as when she’d realized whom she was talking to on the phone. “If that’s what you prefer,” she added.
“May I call you Kate?”
“Of course.”
“Why do I feel that I’ve just made you extremely uncomfortable?” Barrington asked. The amusement was clearly back, touching the deep baritone with intimacy.
This was the way his voice must have sounded before, Kate thought, back when those beautiful debutantes had hung on his every word, their eyes drinking in the perfection of feature that had not changed. He was still as handsome, hiding here in the shadowed existence that he had chosen or had been forced to choose. The sexual magnetism was still there. With the dark, honeyed warmth of his tone she had felt its power move through her body, sensual and inviting.
“Thorne,” she repeated obediently. She had never even called him that in her imagination.
“I know it sounds like one of those names Hollywood dreamed up—Rip or Rock or Cord. I do realize how ridiculous it is, but given the options available to her, I confess that I’m grateful my mother had the good sense to settle on Thorne.”
Harlan Thornedyke Barrington, Kate thought—and then she laughed. He was right. By far the lesser of the possible evils. His laughter joined hers, and when she became aware of the sound, she was again unprepared for how intimate it was. He was just a man, she reminded herself. With her fascination, she knew that she truly had made him larger than life.
Just a man. Just like Kahler. Just like any of the other guys she had been involved with through the years. Been involved with? she repeated mentally, incredulous at what she had just thought. Slow down, she reminded herself. Just because she was here, finally talking to Barrington did not—definitely did not—mean they were involved.
“I thought I’d try talking to Mays,” she said, attempting to get back on track, back to the reason she was here. This might be the only chance she would ever have to discuss these things with Barrington. She couldn’t afford to blow it.
“My advice is to stay as far away from Mays as you can.”
“You think he’s still dangerous.”
“The school bombing isn’t the only crime Mays was involved in. The informant mentioned a lynching, and there were other things. Nothing Mays could be tied to legally, but he was a man filled with hate and more than willing to act on his feelings.”
“Surely after all this time—” Kate began.
“A rattler’s not any less dangerous because he’s old. He’s just bigger and meaner. More full of venom.”
It was a Southernism. Something her grandmother might have said, and like all truisms, it was probably a very accurate opinion where a snake like Wilford Mays was concerned.
“Stay away from Mays,” he warned. “Chances are he has nothing to do with the current bombings. The police would surely have investigated that possibility.”
Only, Kate knew, that wasn’t the case. No one, despite Thorne Barrington’s initial request, had ever checked out Mays. She had even discouraged Kahler when he’d suggested an investigation of the alleged school bomber.
“Why don’t you tell me the things Draper’s widow told you,” Barrington said. “It’s possible there may be something there. At least, I think that’s more likely to result in something useful than pursuing a seventy-year-old bigot.”
Kate glanced down at her notebook and realized that in the dimness of the room she could barely make out her notes, a confusing mixture of real shorthand and her own personal variety. She could hardly ask Barrington to turn on the lights. and he was so accustomed to this omnipresent darkness that he apparently didn’t realize there was a problem with what he’d just proposed.
Her eyes still lowered to the barely discernible words she had scrawled across the ruled paper, she realized there was only one thing to do. She would have to recount from memory what Jackie Draper had told her.
Kate took a deep breath, trying to think where to start. As she began to talk, however, she found that the events of Hall Draper’s life—so ordinary as to be unremarkable—had made an indelible impression. She wasn’t aware of the passage of time, eventually as lost in the narrative as she had been when she had listened to it in that sun-striped room in Tucson
“And finally, when I asked her if her husband had ever been mixed up in anything…unsavory, she could only think of one thing, almost an afterthought. It was about a girl who had gotten pregnant at fourteen with what might have been Hall Draper’s child. She had an abortion, either because she was forced to by her family or because that’s what she wanted. Not what Draper had wanted maybe, but he had felt he was too young to have much effect on that decision. Mrs. Draper said that’s the one thing in his life he regretted. That poor lost baby.”
The words drifted away into the silence. The room was darker now, she realized The man who had listened without comment to the story of Hall Draper’s life was almost completely enveloped in the shadows that had deepened with the approach of twilight. Suddenly she was embarrassed for having taken up his afternoon on what was apparently an exercise in futility.
“Nothing in that story meant anything to you,” she said. It wasn’t even a question. Barrington had asked for no repetitions, had not commented on or questioned any of what she’d related.
“Perhaps not. Not in the way you’d hoped.” The deep voice was almost disembodied, simply coming out of the darkness. “But obviously, it meant something to you.”
She hadn’t intended to reveal how moved she had been by the images of the Drapers’ private lives, by the decency of Hall Draper, the grief of his widow.
“It just seemed to me that whatever mistake he made—at whatever point in his life—the way he had lived the rest of it should have made up for it. It should have been enough.”
“But it wasn’t,” Thorne said softly.
“No,” she whispered. “He died, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for his death. Not in anything she told me.”
“Or for any of the others?” he asked.
She shook her head, and then wondered if he could see her, given the darkness. “No,” she whispered.
“Perhaps you won’t understand this, but knowing you feel that way helps.”
“Knowing…?”
“That none of them deserved what happened.”
“And that means that you didn’t deserve it either,” she said, suddenly understanding.
“I’ve spent three years wondering what I did. Maybe the answer is, I did nothing.”
“But like Hall Draper—like all of us, I suppose—there are things in your life you aren’t proud of.”
“Like all of us,” he acknowledged.
“What do you regret, Judge Barrington?”
It was the question any good reporter would have asked, but she was curious on another level. What did a man, highly respected for his integrity, his dedication to duty, a man who had lived the kind of life Thorne Barrington had, have to regret?
; “Perhaps I’ll tell you that the next time we talk,” he said softly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I have another appointment.” It was certainly a lie, graceful and polite, but still a lie.
“Of course,” she said, pushing the unused notebook back into her purse. “I appreciate your agreeing to see me. Thank you for your time.”
“A commodity of which I seem to have an unlimited supply.”
“Does that mean I can come back?” she asked, deliberately injecting the teasing note. “When I have other questions?”
“As long as our conversations remain simply that,” he surprised her by agreeing. “I’m not interested in having my name or my comments appear in your paper. I can assure you that…my situation attracted all the attention I ever desire in this lifetime. If you want my input, then like your other sources, I expect our relationship to remain completely confidential.”
“Of course,” Kate agreed. Our relationship. He meant professional, of course, but for some reason the words had echoed more strongly than the rest of the warning. “I never intended to make any part of our conversation public.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said. “Shall I ring for Elliot or do you think you can find your way out?” There was a pause before he added, his voice touched with humor, “Again.”
His timing had been impeccable, and she paid tribute by laughing. “Thank you, but I believe I can manage.”
She stood up, gathering up her bag, and began to cross to the sliding doors. Before she reached them, she remembered the retriever. “Where’s your dog?” she asked.
“Elliot’s fastened him in one of the rooms upstairs. He was afraid he’d frighten you.” The amusement was still there, pleasantly intriguing in the deep voice. “For some reason, Elliot is under the impression that the retriever’s a guard dog.”
“Then I’m glad you’ve got a fence,” she said.
She let herself out of the parlor, but she stopped in the wide foyer, looking up the stairs where Elliot and the puppy were waiting for her to leave. Then they would once again become a part of the limited world of the man they obviously adored. The man who had, for some reason, allowed her to enter this very private domain. Who had indicated he would allow it again, providing she, too, guarded the privacy which he seemed to value above anything else—even, it seemed, above human companionship.
