Heartbeat

by Joan Johnston

  She unlocked her front door and turned to keep him at bay. “Good night, Jack. I—”

  He reached behind her, shoved open the door, and edged her inside. “We have some talking to do.”

  She walked away from him, gathering the satin stole protectively around her, before she turned to face him. “What is it you want from me?”

  “The truth, Maggie.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. About your past. Tonight was the second time I’ve learned some startling information—unbelievable information—about you from a third party.”

  “I’m not a murderer, Jack. I’m not a horrible person.”

  “What happened to your kids, Maggie? What happened to your husband?”

  “My sons drowned, Jack,” she said in a hard, cold voice. “And Woody died.”

  “That isn’t enough, Maggie. I want to hear all of it. How did they drown? How did he die? The truth. Everything you’ve been hiding from me, starting with why you never mentioned one of your sons is still alive!”

  Her eyes went wide with fright before she turned and ran for the bedroom, abandoning the satin stole, which floated toward the carpet.

  Before it could land, he caught her, shoving her back against the wall, pinning her there with his body. He swore under his breath when he realized he was hard and ready, and what he really wanted to do was put himself inside her.

  But he couldn’t. Not with all the lies of omission that stood between them. He felt so much, too much, all of it feral. His eyes burned into hers, and what he saw made his gut twist.

  Hopelessness . . . and raw anguish blurred by tears that spilled as she tried to blink them back. She was rigid as a fence post held taut by barbed wire. When he reached out to brush a tear from her cheek, she bucked against him, inflaming him even more.

  “I don’t owe you anything, Jack. If you don’t let me go this instant, I’ll—”

  Jack backed up, his breathing choppy, his pulse pounding at his temples, his hands balled into fists to keep him from reaching for her again. “I’ll find out the truth, Maggie.”

  “Nobody knows the truth but me, Jack. It’s nobody’s business but mine.”

  “The police in Minnesota—”

  “Despite Victoria’s accusations, no charges were ever brought against me.”

  “What happened to the son who didn’t die, Maggie? Where is he?”

  She looked as though he’d kicked her in the stomach. “I can’t tell you that, Jack.”

  “I need an answer, Maggie.”

  “Brian’s someplace safe,” she said. “Someplace where he can be cared for properly.”

  Safe from whom? Jack wondered. Then he remembered how upset Victoria had been that Maggie wouldn’t tell her where her surviving grandson was. Safe from his grandmother? Jack thought with horror.

  “Do you see him, Maggie? Do you visit your son?”

  “Of course I do! What kind of mother do you think I am?”

  He forked a hand though his hair, leaving it askew. He didn’t want to believe the worst of her, but for an innocent woman, she had an awful lot of secrets. “I don’t know what to think of you, Maggie.”

  Her shoulders squared, and her chin tilted up in defiance. But he saw the defeat in her eyes.

  What was it she had lost?

  The same thing he had lost, Jack realized. Any hope of a relationship . . . even a superficial sexual one.

  “I still want you, Maggie.”

  She hissed in a breath, and the pulse at the base of her throat speeded up, but her stance didn’t soften. “Go home, Jack.”

  Jack stood where he was another moment, feeling the heat of her, smelling the scents of her and him mixed up together. She was right, of course. He was crazy to want her when he knew so little about her . . . about her secrets. The physical attraction between them had to be resisted. At least until a few more things got settled. “Good night, Maggie.”

  Jack stood looking at her for another heartbeat, then headed for the door.

  “Jack.”

  The sadness in her voice stopped him. He glanced at her over his shoulder, repressing the urge to reach out to her. “Yes, Maggie?”

  “Goodbye.”

  “I’m not going far. And I’ll be back.” He needed to finish things between them one way or another. He didn’t want the memory of her, of wanting her, haunting him the rest of his life.

  All he had to do was unearth the real killer. Then he’d come back and find out what secrets kept Maggie Wainwright locked in such a barren life.

  Halfway down the stairs, Jack realized he had left Maggie alone and upset with four bottles of booze. What if she found the liquor she’d bought for him too tempting to resist?

  On the other hand, it wasn’t his responsibility to keep her sober. In fact, if he’d learned anything from having an alcoholic for a mother, it was that there wasn’t much you could do to separate a determined alcoholic from her bottle except put her in an institution somewhere. Jack reminded himself he was better off staying out of it.

  He reached the guardhouse and waited for the scrolled iron gate to open. The longer he sat there, the more agitated he became. He backed up instead of going through the gate and made a U-turn to the right—almost sliding into the empty gully where the San Antonio River would have run, except for the drought—and headed back toward the upscale condominium. He hadn’t gone twenty feet before Maggie passed him headed the opposite direction in a white Mercedes coupe with a black cloth top.

  She never saw him. Her eyes were riveted to the road in front of her. If he drove all the way back to the entrance, she’d be long gone before he got turned around. Jack jerked the wheel and crushed a couple hundred dollars’ worth of impatiens and begonias alongside the road as he turned his truck back around.

  He caught up to Maggie just as she turned off Patterson and headed south. Jack followed her to I-35. Was she heading back downtown to the gala? Before she reached the MacArthur Freeway she headed west on I-10. The southwest side of town was mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking. Why would she be heading in that direction?

  At least she hadn’t stayed home to drink, Jack thought. That was small comfort, however, because there were plenty of bars in southwest San Antonio. Maybe she was going to see her son. Jack hoped so. If he could see the boy, see where she kept him, how she related to him, it would answer a lot of his concerns.

  Maggie exited into one of the poorer neighborhoods and turned west again, deeper into Spanish-speaking San Antonio.

  Jack pulled to the curb as she edged her coupe between two pickup trucks at a rowdy cantina. He started to get out of his truck, then realized Maggie was still sitting in the coupe. When a couple of drunks shoved open the wooden door and left the bar, the music was loud enough that Jack heard the twang of string guitars from a really wretched Mariachi band from where he was parked halfway down the block.

  After the two men left in a rusted-out pickup, Maggie opened her car door and got out. Her sleeveless white knit top was tucked into skin-tight jeans that were tucked into bright red cowboy boots. The garish neon lights from the cantina turned her flesh green, like a piece of surreal art. This strange Texas barfly was another part of Maggie . . . one he had no desire to know.

  Jack started to get out of his truck, determined to stop her from going inside. Before he could act, she was back in the coupe. Stones sprayed as she backed out of the gravel parking lot and headed south again. He followed her south and west until they were in a section of San Antonio he was familiar with only because it had been singled out in San Antonio police statistics for its vicious gangs, illegal drug sales, and drive-by shootings.

  Maggie pulled into the parking lot of what he thankfully realized was a Catholic church. It was old enough to be built of adobe, rather than brick or cement. After she hurried inside, he parked his truck beside her coupe, wondering whether either vehicle would be there when they came back out.

  He got his Colt from beneath the truck
seat, checked the rounds, and stuck it in the back of his tux trousers under his jacket, where he could get to it if he needed it. Then he headed for the door she had entered and stepped inside.

  Stairs led down into a stygian gloom. Jack took his gun out and put his back against the adobe wall as he eased down toward the voices he could hear below him.

  Drugs, he thought disgustedly. She’s jumped from alcohol to drugs. Probably needs them to deal with the guilt of killing her husband and father-in-law . . . and drowning her sons. An insidious voiced added, And killing a bunch of kids?

  The stairs went down a long way. The place must have been a refuge from Indians once upon a time. Or maybe a wine cellar for the priests, he thought more cynically. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, Jack took a quick look around the corner, then laid his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and slowly let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Lord Jesus, help me.”

  Chapter 11

  It was an AA meeting. After his mother died, Jack had sworn he’d never go to another one with anybody. Damned if Maggie hadn’t tricked him into coming here! His conscience—not to mention Captain Buckelew—would never let him hear the end of it if he didn’t stay and make sure she got home safely.

  A man at the front of the room announced, “My name is Hector, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hey, Hector,” the crowd responded.

  Jack slipped the Colt into the back of his tux trousers and eased into a metal folding chair on the aisle at the back of the room, which was filled almost to capacity. He knew there were nonsmoking AA meetings, but this wasn’t one of them. A smoky haze drifted over the audience, most of whom also held Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  Because of the shadowy light, the coolness of the place, and the stunted walls of dirt and straw that surrounded him, Jack had the sensation of being buried alive. He glanced over his shoulder at the long stairway that led back up to the outside world. Some of these lost souls would make it out of here. Some would not.

  Jack located Maggie and watched her as the young man on a slightly elevated platform at the front of the room told the story of how he’d become an alcoholic, what had turned him around, how long he’d been sober—“two months and eleven days”—and what his life was like now—“Not too good, you know? Because my wife won’t take me back, you know? Because she says I won’t stay sober. And I’ll hit her again.” A pause and then, “I really miss my kid, you know?”

  Jack hardened his heart against Hector’s story. He saw himself in the victim’s role, and he hadn’t much sympathy for the alcoholic. Chances were, Hector would fall off the wagon. His wife was right to keep her distance from him. It was too bad about the kid, but based on his own experience, Hector’s kid was better off without an alcoholic parent around.

  That might seem heartless, but it was the way he felt.

  When Jack saw Maggie head for the front of the room, he slid down to his tailbone behind the woman in front of him. He hadn’t really expected Maggie to get up and talk, and he didn’t want his presence to keep her from saying whatever it was she planned to say. It was obvious she knew the routine.

  “Hello. My name is Maggie, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hey, Maggie,” the crowd responded.

  She spoke so softly, he could barely hear her at the back of the room. He sat up and hunkered forward on his chair, listening closely.

  Jack wondered why Maggie had come all the way over here to attend an AA meeting when he was sure there was a smokeless meeting held right in her own neighborhood. As Maggie began to speak, the reason she wasn’t telling her story anywhere near anyone who might know her as Margaret Wainwright, attorney and daughter-in-law of the late Richard Woodson Wainwright, became painfully apparent.

  Maggie seldom looked up at her fellow alcoholics. Her eyes stayed locked on her hands, which were twined and knotted in front of her. “I first started drinking when my sons drowned and my husband died all in the same week.”

  She cut off the sympathetic sounds from the crowd by saying, “I blame myself for their deaths. I know it doesn’t make sense to think I could have caused what happened to them to happen. But I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t. . . . ”

  She took a hitching breath, and then another. Her chin wobbled. When she looked up, her eyes were pooled with tears.

  Jack waited with bated breath for the rest of her confession. The room was absolutely silent. Had they all heard this before? Did they know what was coming? What had Maggie done? How was she responsible? Why did she accept blame for her family’s deaths but not take liability for her father-in-law’s demise?

  Jack swore under his breath when he realized, as Maggie began speaking again, that she wasn’t going to answer any of his questions. She had completely changed the subject. Jack blew out a frustrated breath as he followed her speech.

  “You cannot imagine what it was like to hear that my beautiful sons, Stanley and Brian, had both drowned, and that my husband, Woody, was not expected to survive more than a few more hours,” she said in a voice raw with pain. “I was beside myself, completely hysterical. I couldn’t live with the guilt of knowing what I’d done. I wanted to die, to be with them.”

  Jack was confused. Although one of the boys had survived, Maggie was making it sound like they had both died.

  She lowered her eyes again, and the lawman in him wished he could see into them to search for the truth. What really happened, Maggie? You aren’t telling us the whole story. What are you hiding?

  He was shocked by her next revelation.

  “I . . . I tried to kill myself with an overdose of sedatives the hospital gave me,” she said. “My husband’s uncle found me in the hospital chapel before the pills could do their work. I was kept in a psychiatric hospital for quite a while, because I made the mistake of admitting I would kill myself the instant they let me out.”

  Jack heard the return of the sympathetic responses from the audience that kept Maggie talking through her pain. He was intrigued—and discomfited—by what he was hearing. Maggie suicidal? Maggie hospitalized for mental instability?

  “By the time the hospital released me, I realized that while I still felt remorseful, without the powerful emotions that I had felt when I first learned what I’d wrought, I no longer had the courage to kill myself.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “I hated myself for being a coward. And I blamed myself totally for what had happened to my family. I had to escape somehow, and I found that escape in a bottle.”

  What did Porter say that turned you around? Jack wondered. He got his answer immediately.

  “Nine months later my husband’s uncle sought me out. He wanted to know why I was ignoring my one remaining son in favor of a bottle of alcohol.” She shook her head slightly and frowned, as though she were remembering the moment. “At first I was confused . . . because I was drunk and because what he was saying was both impossible and what I had so often dreamed of hearing.

  “I told him, ‘My sons are dead.’ But he said, ‘Brian is very much alive. He’s come out of the coma, and he needs his mother.’”

  Maggie’s face became an image of wonder and joy. Her voice was unsteady as she finished, “That was the beginning of my struggle to stay sober. I haven’t taken a drink since that day, nine years, eight months, and twenty-nine days ago.”

  The audience whistled and clapped and shouted enthusiastically.

  Jack wanted to know who the hell had neglected to tell Maggie one of her sons was still alive. He waited to hear what had happened when she got sober and finally saw her son again. But she skipped past everything that had happened over the past nine years and focused on the present.

  “My son lives in a home now, and I see him as often as I can. I have a steady job, and I’m happy. And sober.”

  The audience applauded again, and Maggie headed back to her seat.

  Jack’s mind was whirling. Why had she thought Brian was de
ad in the first place? Why hadn’t someone told her something sooner about her son being in a coma? Where had the child been all that time? What had made Porter Cobb come looking for her so much later? And why didn’t Victoria Wainwright know where her grandson was living now?

  Jack wasn’t sure how long Maggie planned to stay at the meeting, now that she’d testified, and he figured he’d better leave before he got caught. He didn’t want Maggie thinking he was following her, and he’d be hard-pressed to come up with an explanation for being in this part of town. He waited until she had settled into her chair, then rose and headed for the door.

  A priest stepped in front of him and said, “I hope you find the peace you seek, my son.”

  The words froze Jack in place, taking on a far greater meaning than he knew the priest could have intended. He’d had no peace since . . . since he’d watched the light die in a little girl’s eyes.

  When he could move again, he hurried past the priest and took the short, narrow stairs three at a time to reach the top and freedom. He heaved a lungful of fresh night air as soon as his feet hit the asphalt parking lot and stood waiting for the muscles in his throat to unclench so he could swallow.

  The priest’s offer of peace had not provided a balm for his soul. It had only reminded him of a little girl with brown eyes and pigtails he’d been trying hard to forget.

  Jack’s eyes burned, and his nose stung. Maggie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Jack had terrible secrets of his own.

  He clambered into his pickup, gunned the engine, and bumped in and out of a deep pot-hole as he backed out of the parking lot. He wasn’t going far, just up the street where there wasn’t any light, so he could watch Maggie’s car to make sure it didn’t get stolen, then follow her home to make sure she got there safely.

  The neighborhood was surprisingly quiet, and there wasn’t any traffic. Jack turned the radio dial to KASE, one of Austin’s popular country music stations, but the sad wail of the violins and the even sadder tale being told in Clint Walker’s nasal twang only made him feel worse.