by Nora Roberts
“If it hadn’t mattered, didn’t matter more than anything else in my life, I could have stayed. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You hurt me, you humiliated me, you—”
“I love you.”
She jerked back as if to avoid a blow. “You expect my knees to go weak now? You think you can say that and make me run into your arms?”
“No. I wouldn’t love you if you couldn’t stand there and spit at me after I’d said it.” He walked to her, gave in to the need to touch her. Just a brush of his fingertips over her shoulders. “And I do love you, Jo Ellen. Maybe I always did. Maybe that seven-year-old girl ruined me for anyone else. I don’t know. But I need you to believe me. I need to say it, and I need you to believe it before I start the rest.”
She stared into his eyes, and now her knees did start to tremble. “You do mean it.”
“Enough to put my past, present, and future in your hands.” He took hers in his for a moment, studied them, memorized them, then let them go. “I went back to New York. There’s a friend of the family, a doctor. A neurologist. I wanted him to run some tests on me.”
“Tests?” Baffled, she pushed at her hair. “What kind of—Oh, my God.” It struck her like a fist, hard in the heart. “You’re sick. A neurologist? What is it? A tumor.” Her blood shivered to ice in her veins. “But you can have treatment. You can—”
“I’m not sick, Jo. There’s no tumor, there’s nothing wrong with me. But I had to be sure.”
“There’s nothing wrong?” She folded her arms again, hugged them to her body. “I don’t understand. You went back to New York to have tests run on your brain when there’s nothing wrong with you?”
“I said I needed to be sure. Because I thought I might have had blackouts or been sleepwalking or had fugues. And have maybe killed Susan Peters.”
She lowered herself gingerly, bracing a hand on the back of the chair as she sat on the arm. She never took her eyes off his. “Why would you think such a crazy thing?”
“Because she was strangled here on the island. Because her body was hidden. Because her husband, her family, her friends, might have gone the rest of their lives not knowing what had happened.”
“Stop it.” She couldn’t get her breath, had to fight back the urge to clap her hands over her ears. Her heart was beating too fast, making her head spin, her skin damp. She knew the signs, the panic waiting slyly to spring. “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
“I don’t want to tell you any more. But neither one of us has a choice.” He braced himself not only to face it but to face her. “My father killed your mother.”
“That’s insane, Nathan.” She willed herself to get up and run, but she couldn’t move. “And it’s cruel.”
“It’s both. And it’s also the truth. Twenty years ago, my father took your mother’s life.”
“No. Your father—Mr. David—was kind, he was a friend. This is crazy talk. My mother left.” Her voice shuddered and broke, then rose. “She just left.”
“She never left Desire. He . . . he put her body in the marsh. Buried her in the salt marsh.”
“Why are you saying this? Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the truth, and I’ve avoided it too long already.” Nathan forced himself to say the rest, to finish it while she shut her eyes and shook her head fiercely. “He planned it from the minute he saw her, when we arrived that summer.”
“No. No, stop this.”
“I can’t stop what’s already happened. He kept a journal and . . . evidence in a safe-deposit box. I found it all after he and my mother died.”
“You found it.” Tears leaked through her lashes as she wrapped her arms tight around her body and rocked. “You came back here.”
“I came back here to face it, to try to remember what that summer had been like. What he had been like ... then. And to try to decide whether to leave it all buried or to tell your family what my family had done.”
The familiar flood of sick panic rushed through her, roared in her head, raced through her blood. “You knew. You knew all along, and you came back here. You took me to bed knowing.” Nausea made her dizzy as she surged to her feet. “You were inside me.” Rage sliced through her an instant before her hand cracked across his cheek. “I let you inside me.” She slapped him again, viciously. He neither defended himself nor evaded the blows. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He’d known she would look at him just like this, with hate and disgust, even fear. He had no choice but to accept it. “I didn’t face it. My father . . . he was my father.”
“He killed her, he took her away from us. And all these years ...”
“Jo, I didn’t know until after he’d died. I’ve been trying to come to grips with it for months. I know what you’re going through now—”
“You can’t know.” She flung the words out. She wanted to hurt him, to scar him, to make him suffer. “I can’t stay here. I can’t look at you. Don’t!” She jerked back, hands fisted when he reached out. “Don’t put your hands on me. I could kill you for ever putting them on me. You bastard, you stay away from me and my family.”
When she ran, Nathan didn’t try to stop her. He couldn’t. But he followed her erratic dash, keeping her in sight. If he could do nothing else, he would make certain she arrived safe at Sanctuary.
But it wasn’t to Sanctuary that she fled.
SHE couldn’t go home. Couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t clear her vision. Part of her wanted to simply fall to the ground, curl up and scream until her mind and body were empty of grief. But she was terrified that she’d never find the strength to get up again.
So she ran, without thought of destination, through the trees, through the dark, with images flipping hideously through her head.
The photograph of her mother, coming to life. The eyes opening. Confusion, fear, pain. The mouth stretching wide for a scream.
Pain stabbed into Jo’s side like a knife. She gripped it, whimpering, and kept running.
On the sand now, with the ocean crashing. Her breath heaved out of her lungs. She fell once, hitting hard on her hands and knees, only to scramble up and stumble back into a run. She only knew she had to get away, to run away from the pain and this horribly tearing sorrow.
She heard someone call her name, and the sound of feet pounding the sand behind her. She nearly tripped again, righted herself, then turned to fight.
“Jo, honey, what is it?” Clad in only a robe, her hair streaming wet from the shower, Kirby hurried toward her. “I was out on the deck and saw you—”
“Don’t touch me!”
“All right.” Instinctively, Kirby lowered her voice, gentled it. “Why don’t you come up to the house? You’ve hurt yourself. Your hands are bleeding.”
“I . . .” Confused, Jo looked down, saw the scrapes and the slow trickle of blood on the heels of her hands. “I fell.”
“I know. I saw you. Come on up. I’ll clean them for you.”
“I don’t need—they’re all right.” She couldn’t even feel her hands. Then her legs began to tremble, her head began to spin. “He killed my mother. Kirby, he murdered my mother. She’s dead.”
Cautiously, Kirby moved closer until she could slide a supporting hand around Jo’s waist. “Come with me. Come home with me now.” When Jo sagged, she led her across the sand. Glancing back, she saw Nathan standing a few yards away. In the moonlight their eyes met briefly. Then he turned and walked away into the dark.
“I feel sick,” Jo murmured. Sensation was creeping back, tiny needle pricks all over her skin, and with it the greasy churning in her stomach.
“It’s all right. You need to lie down. Lean on me and we’ll get you inside.”
“He killed her. Nathan knew. He told me.” It felt as if she were floating now, up the steps, in the door of the cottage. “My mother’s dead.”
Saying nothing, Kirby helped Jo onto the bed, put a light bl
anket over her. She was beginning to tremble with shock now. “Slow breaths,” Kirby ordered. “Concentrate on breathing. I’m just going in the other room for a moment. I’m going to get something to help you.”
“I don’t need anything.” Fresh panic snaked through her, and she gripped Kirby’s hand hard. “No sedatives. I can get through this. I can. I have to.”
“Of course you can.” Kirby eased onto the bed and took Jo’s wrist to check her pulse. “Are you ready to tell me about it?”
“I have to tell someone. I can’t tell my family yet. I can’t face that yet. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to feel.”
The pulse rate was slowing, and Jo’s pupils were returning to normal. “What did Nathan say to you, Jo?”
Jo stared at the ceiling, focused on it, centered herself on it. “He told me that his father had murdered my mother.”
“Dear God.” Horrified, Kirby lifted Jo’s hand to her cheek. “How did it happen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I couldn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen. He said his father killed her, that he kept a journal. Nathan found it, and he came back here. I slept with him.” Tears trickled out of her eyes, slid away. “I slept with the son of my mother’s murderer.”
Calm was needed now, Kirby knew. And cool logic. The wrong word, the wrong tone, and she was afraid Jo would break in her hands. “Jo, you slept with Nathan. You cared for Nathan, and he for you.”
“He knew. He came back here knowing what his father had done.”
“And that must have been terribly hard for him.”
“How can you say that?” Furious, Jo pushed herself onto her elbows. “Hard for him?”
“And courageous,” Kirby said softly. “Jo, how old would he have been when your mother died?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Nine or ten, I imagine. Just a little boy. Are you going to blame the little boy?”
“No. No. But he’s not a little boy now, and his father—”
“Nathan’s father. Not Nathan.”
A sob choked out, then another. “He took her away from me.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.” Kirby gathered Jo close. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
As Jo wept in her arms, Kirby knew this storm was only the beginning.
IT took an hour before she could think again. She sipped the hot, sweet tea Kirby made her. The sick panic had flowed away in a wash of grief. Now, for a moment, the grief was almost as soothing as the tea.
“I knew she was dead. Part of me always knew, from the time it happened. I would dream of her. As I got older I pushed the dreams away, but they would always come back. And they only got stronger.”
“You loved her. Now, as horrible as things are, you know she didn’t leave you.”
“I can’t find comfort in that yet. I wanted to hurt Nathan. Physically, emotionally, in every possible way to cause him pain. And I did.”
“Do you think that’s an abnormal reaction? Jo, give yourself a break.”
“I’m trying to. I nearly cracked again. I would have if you hadn’t been there.”
“But I was.” Kirby squeezed Jo’s hand. “And you’re stronger than you think. Strong enough to get through this.”
“I have to be.” She drank more tea, then set the cup down. “I have to go back to Nathan’s.”
“You don’t have to do anything tonight but get some rest.”
“No, I never asked why or how or ...” She shut her eyes. “I have to have the answers. I don’t think I can live with this until I have the answers. When I go to my family, I have to know it all.”
“You could go to them now, I’ll go with you. You could ask the questions together.”
“I have to do it alone. I’m at the center of this, Kirby.” Jo’s head throbbed nastily. When she opened her eyes they were brutally dark in a colorless face. “I’m in love with the man whose father murdered my mother.”
WHEN Kirby dropped her off at Nathan’s cottage, Jo could see his silhouette through the screen door. She wondered if either of them would ever do a harder thing in their lives than facing the past and each other.
He said nothing as she climbed the steps, but opened the door, stepped back to let her in. He’d thought he would never see her again, and he wasn’t sure whether that would have been harder to live with, or if seeing her like this—pale and stricken—was worse.
“I need to ask you . . . I need to know.”
“I’ll tell you what I can.”
She rubbed her hands together so that the small pain of her scratched palms would keep her centered. “Did they—were they involved?”
“No.” He wanted to turn away but forced himself to face the pain in her eyes. “There was nothing like that between them. Even in the journal, he wrote that she was devoted to her family. To her children, her husband. Jo—”
“But he wanted there to be. He wanted her.” She opened her hands. “They fought? There was an accident.” Her breath shuddered, and the words were a plea. “It was an accident.”
“No. God.” It was worse, he thought, by every second that passed it grew worse. “He knew her habits. He studied them. She used to walk, at night, around the gardens.”
“She . . . she loved the flowers at night.” The dream she’d had the night they’d found Susan Peters spun back into her mind. “She loved the white ones especially. She loved the smells and the quiet. She called it her alone time.”
“He chose the night,” Nathan continued. “He put a sleeping pill into my mother’s wine so she ... so she wouldn’t know he’d been gone. Everything he did he documented step by step in his journal. He wrote that he waited for Annabelle at the edge of the forest to the west of the house.” It was killing him by degrees to say it, to look into Jo’s face and say it. “He knocked her unconscious and took her into the forest. He had everything set up. He’d already set up his lights, his tripod. It wasn’t an accident. It was planned. It was premeditated. It was deliberate.”
“But why?” She had to sit. On legs stiff and brittle as twigs, she stumbled to a chair. “I remember him. He was kind to me. And patient. Daddy took him fishing. And Mama would make him pecan pie now and then because he was fond of it.” She made a helpless sound, then pressed her fingers to her lips to hold it back. “Oh, God, you want me to believe he murdered her for no reason?”
“He had a purpose.” He did turn away now and strode into the kitchen to drag a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard. “You could never call it a reason.”
He splashed the liquor into a glass, tossed it back quickly, and hissed through the sting. With his palms braced on the counter, he waited for his blood to settle.
“I loved him, Jo. He taught me how to ride a bike, how to field a grounder. He paid attention. Whenever he traveled, he’d call home not just to talk to my mother but to all three of us. And he listened—not just the pretense of listening some adults think a child can’t see through. He cared.”
He turned back to her, his eyes eloquent. “He would bring my mother flowers for no reason. I’d lie in bed at night and listen to them laughing together. We were happy, and he was the center of it. Now I have to face that there was no center, that he was capable of something monstrous.”
“I feel carved out,” she managed. Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her shoulders. “Scraped out. Raw. All these years.” She squeezed her eyes tight a moment. “Your lives just went on?”
“He was the only one who knew, and he was very careful. Our lives just went on. Until his ended and I went through his personal papers and found the journal and photographs.”
“Photographs.” The floating sensation ended with a jerk. “Photographs of my mother. After she was dead.”
He had to say it all, no matter how even the thought ripped through his brain. “ ‘The decisive moment,’ he called it.”
“Oh, my God.” Lectures heard, lectures given, whirled in her head. Capturing the decisive moment,
anticipating when the dynamics of a situation will reach peak, knowing when to click the shutter to preserve that most powerful image. “It was a study, an assignment.”
“It was his purpose. To manipulate, to cause, to control, and to capture death.” Nausea churned violently. He downed more Scotch, pitting the liquor against the nausea. “It wasn’t all, it can’t be. There was something warped inside him. Something we never saw. Something no one ever saw, or suspected. He had friends, a successful career. He liked to listen to ball games on TV and read
