It was sturdy enough, built so well that even after twenty years of disuse it was in remarkably good shape. Ripping the board down from the door had been a struggle, using up what little energy Jayne and Ryder had had left.
They’d decided to leave most of the windows boarded up, “just in case,” Ryder had said. They’d uncovered one, using a crowbar in the toolbox inside the building. By the fading evening light, Jayne had looked around at the plain but well-provisioned single room, thinking that when Ryder had wanted to escape, he’d certainly been thorough about it.
There were even a couple of candles and some matches in a waterproof container in the cupboard. They hadn’t needed the light for long—both of them had been close to exhausted. Despite the hooting and cawing of various birds and beasts out in the forest, Jayne had fallen asleep almost immediately on the rope bed in the corner. Ryder’s deepening breathing from across the room—he’d insisted on sleeping on the floor, with a blanket under him—had been a familiar lullaby for the few minutes it had taken her to slide into sleep.
The problem was, the cabin’s provisions didn’t include food or water. They’d both wakened ravenous and thirsty, and eager to head for the little town Ryder said was just downriver.
The hike back through the woods wasn’t Jayne’s image of a prebreakfast stroll. But it was made easier by the fact that Ryder brought a machete with him from the cabin, and hacked out something closer to her idea of a path. The thought of food at the other end of the trip was enough to keep her going despite her water-soaked pumps and impractical flowery skirt.
Once they’d reached Narvaez, they’d agreed that Ryder should keep a low profile. He stayed with the boat, leaving Jayne to make her phone call and buy some supplies.
Her first stop had been a used-clothing shop across from the grocery store, which provided a pair of sneakers in her size, and some jeans that were only a little too tight. A couple of days of living on crackers and cereal ought to take care of that, she thought as she crossed the street to the grocery. She and Ryder had decided that lighting a fire would be too risky, in case anyone was watching the property. So their shopping list had consisted of food that didn’t need to be cooked.
If the owner of the store thought there was anything odd about her choices, he didn’t say so. He hadn’t looked askance at her explanation about having left unfinished business behind her at work, either.
“There might be several faxes a day,” she told him as she paid for the groceries. “I’ll come back for the first ones later this afternoon. And then I’ll try to stop by in the mornings until this mess at work is cleared up. With luck it won’t take long.”
And with luck, she added silently, the acquaintance she’d called—a law student in Saint Petersburg who’d helped in the past with legal research for stories that accompanied Jayne’s photo spreads—wouldn’t have time to wonder about her request for all available information about Judge John Brady.
“I’m so buried in work right now I can’t describe it,” her friend had said. “But I’m also broke, as usual. So if you want to pay me to dig something up for you, I’ll put your request right on the top of the list. Start looking for those faxes sometime later today.”
“If there’s a pattern in any of this, I can’t see it.” Ryder tossed the shiny fax pages aside and leaned back in his wooden chair.
“I know.” From her cross-legged seat on the bed, Jayne looked across the room at him. “There are a couple of cases here where it seems to me that Brady went very easy on the defendant. But there are other ones where he acted like he was auditioning to play Judge Dread.”
“Like mine.”
“Right.”
The records of Ryder’s own trial were among the documents they’d picked up at the store in Narvaez that afternoon. Ryder had read the account with grim fascination before handing the pages over to Jayne.
A quick glance had been enough to bring it all back. She’d sat through every day of Ryder’s trial a year ago. And she’d replayed it a hundred times in her mind since the moment when the jury had announced a guilty verdict. She didn’t really want to relive the whole experience now.
But Ryder was making it hard to ignore. “Were you there?” he asked. “At my trial, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve seen this Brady guy in action.” Jayne nodded. “What’s he like? I mean, is he bordering on senility or something? That might explain the inconsistencies in his decisions.”
“He’s far from senile. And he seemed very sharp at your trial.”
Ryder snorted. “Too damn sharp, I’d say,” he muttered.
She knew what he meant. Judge Brady had been scathing in pointing out during the trial how Ryder had betrayed his profession and his own integrity. Brady’s final instructions to the jury had been so loaded that it would have been a miracle if they’d found Ryder anything but guilty.
“I wasn’t the only one he threw the book at,” he commented now.
“No. I noticed that, too.”
“Maybe if we can find some common thread among the cases he seemed to come down hardest on...”
Jayne’s friend had been efficient in gathering the records on Brady’s cases. Jayne scanned them again, looking for similarities.
“There’s this guy named Henderson,” she said. “Brady really clobbered him on a racketeering charge.”
“I noticed him earlier. The thing is, the very next month there’s another racketeering case—some guy called Jimmy Trujillo—and Brady let him off easy because the evidence wasn’t up to par.”
“That’s standard practice, Nick. The judge has no control over how the police collect evidence. You had a case thrown out yourself because there was something wrong with the evidence procedure.”
She remembered that case all too well, too. It had seemed to spark a new level of preoccupation in Ryder with his career, a new obsession with his work that had done their already-faltering relationship no good.
When this case is over—
Once this one is wrapped up—
She shook her head, trying to chase away the unwanted memories. “Greg Iverson was the prosecuting attorney on that Henderson case,” she said. “I wonder—if we’re very careful about how we contact him—”
Ryder shook his head. “Too risky,” he said. “After yesterday’s little adventure, whoever’s after us is going to be keeping an eye on Iverson, big-time. We’re on our own with this, Jayne.”
He looked at the sheaf of faxes again. “Brady presided over the trials of a couple of other police officers besides me,” he said. “Once again, there’s no pattern. He was lenient with one, hard-line with the other.”
“I know. I covered both of those trials for the Bulletin.”
He gave her a sharp look. “Was that your choice?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t usually get the courthouse assignments—my beat runs more to human interest stories and social events, but my editor loves corruption-in-high-places stories. He’s been on a kind of one-man crusade to clean up the Miami police department for years now.”
“He getting anywhere with it?”
“Well, he’s got a lot of people mad at him, if you call that progress.”
She could see Ryder thinking hard. At first she thought he was trying to figure out what her angle was in this, and whether she might share her editor’s antipolice sentiments.
She didn’t, of course. But Ryder had sometimes quizzed her about it while they’d been married. He’d been defensive whenever she’d tried to talk about how his preoccupation with his job was affecting their marriage.
But there was none of that old defiance in his blue eyes now. And his next question wasn’t the one she’d expected.
“I thought you said we’d already agreed to split up before I was arrested,” he said.
“We had. About ten minutes before you were arrested, to be exact.”
She knew she would never forget the misery of that night She an
d Ryder had just ended one of their hopeless arguments with the realization that there was nowhere for them to go from here. She could still hear the empty sound of his voice as he’d said, If that’s how you feel, maybe we should call it quits.
There’d been no time to digest the stark conclusion that their marriage was really ending. The knock on the door had been followed by harsh voices—questions—demands—the flashing of lights from the cruisers parked in their driveway—the barking of the neighbors’ dogs as people came out on their porches to see what was happening on the usually quiet suburban street.
“So we were splitting up, but you still came to the trial.”
Ryder’s gravelly voice recalled her to the present. “Yes.” These were questions she really didn’t want to be answering. “It seemed like—the right thing to do.”
“Just like helping me now seems like the right thing to do?” He tapped one thumb against the fax pages on the little table in front of him. “Are you always this loyal, Jayne? Even to people who’ve hurt you?”
This is going nowhere, she told herself. It was like trying to figure out why she kept straying onto Ryder’s side of the bed while she slept, even though her conscious mind knew he was no longer there. Everything to do with their marriage belonged in the past. And she had to find a way to get it to stay there, once and for all.
“It’s not loyalty,” she said. “I told you—I just need to see this finished. These are loose ends, Ryder. I want them tied up so I can get on with my life. Is there anything more we can get from this stuff,” she added, changing the subject, “or do we need to wait for those clippings tomorrow?”
She’d asked her law-student friend to dig up whatever newspaper stories were available about the cases Judge Brady had presided over. By themselves, the legal records didn’t give the whole story. But more background might show a pattern Jayne and Ryder hadn’t been able to see yet.
Ryder’s expression told her he wasn’t fooled by her attempt to deflect his questions. He didn’t pursue the topic, though, just said, “It wouldn’t hurt to see if we can pinpoint when Brady started turning in these erratic verdicts. He seems to have been fairly consistent in his early cases. If there’s a break in the pattern—if we can get your friend to zero in on his life at around the time when things changed—”
He shrugged and tapped the shiny pages on the table. “I want to read these over again,” he said, “but I need some more light to do it with.”
He got up from the chair and moved toward the little cupboard in the corner where Jayne had stored their supplies, including new candles and matches.
He was moving more easily now, she’d noticed. He no longer held himself as though his whole body ached. And when the bandage on his forehead had come loose again this afternoon, they’d decided the lump underneath it was healing well enough that it didn’t need to be covered.
He looked so much more the way he had when she’d first met him, from the sexy angle of his hips, to the suggestive gleam deep in his eyes.
Of course, the haircut helped, too.
They’d been halfway home this afternoon when Ryder had suddenly killed the motor and let the boat drift out of the slow-moving current. He’d nodded toward the new first-aid kit Jayne had bought to replace the one they’d had to leave in the car.
“That thing got a half-decent pair of scissors in it?” he’d demanded.
“Yes. Why?”
He’d pulled the elastic from his ponytail with one quick motion. Jayne felt an all-too-familiar quiver at the sight of that thick, corn-silk mane flying free as he shook his head, loosening his hair.
But he seemed to be thinking along strictly practical lines. “If there are descriptions of me circulating out there, they’ll probably include the ponytail,” he said. “No sense hanging on to a recognizable feature when I can easily get rid of it.”
Getting rid of it sounded so easy and impersonal.
Actually doing it had been something else altogether.
Seating herself on the gunwale behind the captain’s chair, Jayne had done her best to lop off the ponytail and shape his dark blond mane into something resembling a hairstyle.
But her hands, usually so agile and efficient with a camera, had trembled the whole time with the scissors. She’d always loved the way Ryder’s hair felt. And it had been impossible not to remember the way her caresses could make him close his eyes and purr like a big satisfied jungle cat.
Trembling fingers had been only part of the problem.
The haircut she’d come up with—still long on the top, but shorter at the back, layered as expertly as she’d been able to manage—made Ryder look more than ever like the man she’d first fallen in love with.
With the shorter style, the hard, masculine angles of his jaw and cheekbone stood out strikingly. It eased the tense lines that had seemed so noticeable with his hair tightly pulled back. Jayne found her breath quickening all over again as she watched him standing next to the open cupboard. Those high, part-Indian cheekbones were stark and sexy against the dark wood of the cabin’s interior.
“Son of a gun.”
The amazement in his voice recalled her to the present. “What is it?” she asked.
“I thought I’d lost this a long time ago.”
He was holding a leather case in his hand. Jayne had noticed it when she was putting away the supplies, but she hadn’t stopped to see what it was.
Now she realized it was a sheath for a knife. As she watched, Ryder drew out the knife itself. He tilted it back and forth, testing its weight in his palm. The flame of the candle he’d lit caught the edge of the blade, making a sudden gleam in the dim cabin.
“I made this handle,” he said, still sounding surprised and pleased. “When I was about twelve years old.”
He strode toward her across the bare wooden floor, as though he was suddenly impatient to share his handiwork with her. Setting the candleholder on the floor next to the bed, he seated himself close to Jayne on the rope mattress.
It creaked a little under his weight, but he didn’t look worried. He and his grandfather had built virtually everything in this place, he’d told her, not to mention restored the building itself. He seemed to know exactly how much weight the bed would hold.
“Look,” he said, offering the knife to her, handle first. “I did all that inlay myself. My grandfather was a cabinetmaker early in his life, and he showed me how to do it. I got the shells off the beach in Fort Myers when he took me there on a business trip once. He didn’t leave home often, but when he did I usually got to go with him.”
The inlaid handle was beautiful, with pure white shells and abalone set in a filigree pattern that must have taken endless hours to do. But it was Ryder’s face, rather than the knife, that captured Jayne’s attention.
“Do you realize you just told me more about your grandfather in one breath than in all the time I’ve known you?” she said.
Once again she was expecting him to turn defensive, to tell her—as he’d told her so many times before—that none of this mattered.
Once again he startled her.
The open expression never left his face as he turned to look at her. “I wasn’t very happy here,” he said. “I’m not surprised I didn’t want to talk about it.”
What did surprise him was how easy it felt to talk about it now.
Ever since that moment on the river yesterday, when he’d felt all those memories and images flooding back into his mind, he’d found himself in a bittersweet mood that he still wasn’t sure how to handle.
On the one hand, all the uncertainty and isolation of his early life had come back to him with its sting intact. But Jayne’s presence seemed to be softening that somehow.
This is what I wanted when I lived here, he kept catching himself thinking. Someone who understood Someone who was concerned about what the hell was happening to me.
She was only concerned about it on a very short-term basis. She’d made that perfectly clear more than
once.
But Ryder couldn’t keep himself from believing there was a part of Jayne that still cared about him, perhaps as fiercely as he was coming to realize he cared about her. She’d stuck with him, hadn’t she? She’d had plenty of chances to leave him behind these past few days, and she hadn’t.
And then there was the way her mouth had felt flowering into passion under his own. And the way her body had melted against him—
He didn’t want to let himself think about that, not when he was sitting so close to her. He forced his thoughts back to the knife she held, and to his own sudden desire to tell her things he’d apparently kept a tight lid on during their marriage.
“My grandfather wasn’t an easy man to live with,” he said. “He had some—old-fashioned ideas.”
“Such as?” He didn’t miss the sparkle of interest in her wide purple eyes. She did care, he thought exultantly.
“He had a very stern sense of duty,” he said. “He didn’t believe in turning back, no matter how unpleasant things got.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I’d say he taught you more than just how to build things, then,” she said. “That might be a description of yourself, when you were still with the police department.”
It was a disconcerting thought. And he could feel some of his earlier frustration seeping back in when he tried to reach for the memories she was talking about, and realized they still weren’t there.
“I always swore I wasn’t going to be anything like my grandfather,” he said slowly. “Or like my parents, either.”
Jayne was watching him intently, as though she wanted to see what was going on in his thoughts. “That didn’t leave you a lot of early role models you could be like, did it?” she said.
“Oh, there was always the Caped Crusader.” He could tell his attempt at a lighter tone wasn’t fooling her. “And Neil Armstrong. After all, NASA was practically up the road.”
“But you were stuck here. With your grandfather and his sense of duty.” She paused, then added, “Did he think you were a duty, too, Nick?”
A Marriage To Remember Page 14
