Most Likely to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  Easy come, easy go.

  Yeah, and his life had become a series of bad cliches.

  Become? It always was.

  With a sigh, he tossed aside the knife he’d been using to chop the onions for the omelet and lifted the phone to his ear.

  “Yeah, hello?”

  Stunned, he listened to the response—and heard the voice he’d been longing to hear for twenty years.

  Her voice. Uttering his name.

  “Is this Wyatt Goddard?”

  Wyatt Goddard?

  She frowned in surprise at what she had just overheard. Why on earth would Lindsay Farrell be contacting him after all these years?

  After all these years?

  Come on. Why would she contact him ever?

  It was hard to imagine that someone like her had ever crossed paths with someone like him.

  He wasn’t from the wrong side of the tracks, exactly…but pretty darned close.

  He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools—once for smoking, and once for truancy—and his parents were both alcoholics. Not that those things made him an instant loser.

  Far from it, actually. Wyatt Goddard was popular well beyond the boundaries of Washington High. He always had more girlfriends than Oregon had bridges…and Lindsay Farrell always had a boyfriend.

  Well, she did until a few months before Jake died, anyway.

  As for Wyatt, yes, he was popular—but a little scary, too, as far as the girls of St. Elizabeth’s were concerned.

  There was something intriguing, enigmatic, even, about him—a series of contradictions.

  He was athletic, a track star—as well as a pack-a-day smoker.

  He had a reputation as a loner—still, there he was at every party, with girls hanging all over him.

  He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools, but he got decent grades—and he continued to dutifully attend Sunday Mass, usually solo.

  His family was lower middle class, if anything—yet he drove a BMW convertible.

  He always wore the same clothes: well-worn blue jeans, plain Tshirts, and low-heeled boots…even though his mother was a clerk in the young men’s department at Nordstrom and his father worked at Nike. Sunglasses, too, most of the time—even on cloudy days.

  He occasionally revealed a sharply honed sense of humor, but he rarely smiled. When he did, it was there and gone, like a flash of summer lightning that came out of nowhere and left you wondering if it was ever there at all…

  The smile…

  That’s it!

  She knew it seemed familiar.

  Leo Cellamino—who looked nothing like his supposed father, Jake Marcott—happened to have precisely the same smile as Wyatt Goddard.

  She hadn’t been able to put her finger on who he reminded her of at the time, but now she knew.

  Hmm.

  Meanwhile, here was the esteemed Lindsay Farrell, placing a call to Wyatt out of the blue, never stopping to consider that her telephone might be tapped…even after Kristen’s warning.

  Hmm.

  This, she realized, listening intently for whatever was to come, should be interesting.

  An unexpected bonus, if her hunch was correct.

  “It’s Lindsay,” she managed to say, sounding deceptively levelheaded when her brain felt as though it were about to explode.

  “Lindsay Farrell. From Portland. St. Elizabeth’s,” she prodded when the man on the other end of the line didn’t react.

  “I know.” She heard him exhale loudly, as though he were puffing the air through his cheeks. “I know who you are.”

  No, you don’t, she found herself thinking. You know who I was…not who I am now.

  And I never knew you at all.

  “You’re in Connecticut now, huh?” she asked, still marveling at the coincidence that Wyatt was living right here on the East Coast, in Fairfield County, less than fifty miles away.

  Coincidence? There were over twenty million people in this metropolitan area. That they had both ended up here wasn’t nearly as coincidental as it would be if they both lived on some remote island.

  Still…

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve lived all over the place, but I’ve been on the East Coast a few years now.”

  “What…what do you do?”

  “I’m self-employed,” he said briefly, as if that explained everything—or anything at all. “You?”

  “Same thing.”

  “In New York.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes…how did you know?” she asked, wishing her stomach wouldn’t flutter at the prospect that he’d kept track of her.

  “Caller ID,” he said simply. “I just checked it and recognized the 212 area code.”

  “Oh.”

  So much for his keeping track of her. She was lucky he even remembered her name.

  Lindsay struggled to pull herself together, to remember what it was, exactly, she had just rehearsed saying to him, before she actually dialed.

  Wyatt, you should know that I got pregnant the night we were together and I gave birth to your son. I came to New York and had him, then gave him up for adoption because I thought he could have a better life that way. And now he’s found me…and he wants to find you.

  Yes, that was what she was going to say. It had seemed best to go the straightforward route.

  Before this moment, anyway.

  Now she found herself acutely aware that she couldn’t go around dropping bombshells like that over the telephone. Not when she was less than an hour away from the person whose life would be forever altered by her news.

  She had to deliver a bombshell like that in person.

  “I need to see you,” she hastily told Wyatt Goddard, trying not to wonder if the woman who had answered the phone was his wife. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him. About the two of them. It was about their son.

  “Did you say you want to see me?” he echoed, sounding surprised…and intrigued.

  “No. I said I need to see you. As soon as possible, actually.”

  She expected him to argue.

  He didn’t.

  He said, “I’ll come to New York.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Chapter 18

  Driving down I-95 along Long Island Sound in morning rush-hour traffic, Wyatt Goddard was careful not to let the Pagani Zonda’s speedometer rise past eighty. He didn’t want to get another ticket and wind up in traffic school again.

  Sure, he always drove fast—speed was as much a fact of Wyatt’s life as his good looks and fat bank account were.

  Today, however, he was tempted to raise the velocity not as much out of habit as out of anticipation.

  But a traffic stop would only delay the payoff.

  The payoff: after two decades, he was going to see Lindsay Farrell again.

  He had dressed carefully, formally for the occasion. Sure, he still favored jeans and Tshirts in his everyday life. But he now had a closet full of well-cut designer suits, custom-made shirts, Italian silk ties, shiny leather shoes, and sunglasses that cost almost as much as his first car did.

  It had taken no time at all this morning to go from the boxer shorts he’d slept in to the elegant attire he now wore. His dark hair, still damp from his shower, was cut much shorter than it had been back in high school, but he still had a full head of it. Luckily for him, receding hairlines didn’t run in the family. Even his father had aged well, despite his years of hard living.

  And so had Wyatt. Nobody he met ever realized he was closing in on forty. He forgot, most of the time, himself. The only hint of his age, whenever he looked in the mirror, were the faint beginnings of crinkly lines around the corners of his eyes.

  At the moment, they were concealed behind a pair of black designer sunglasses.

  No, the sun wasn’t shining brightly today—not yet, anyway. But he had donned the glasses despite the overcast sky, the way he used to back in high school. Back then, he used them as an impenetrable fort that could ke
ep the world at bay.

  Not anymore. He didn’t have to hide anymore.

  And he wasn’t hiding from Lindsay—not really. But the glasses would give him an advantage. He wouldn’t have to look her in the eye until he’d had a chance to get used to the fact that he was with her again. Until he figured out how he felt about that—and had a chance to look at her and maybe figure out how she felt about him, and why she had called him so abruptly.

  He supposed she was going to tell him. She’d said she had to talk to him about something. What could it be?

  Whatever.

  That she had crashed into his world out of the blue for the second time in his life seemed fitting. He only hoped that this time, she wouldn’t blow right on out of it again.

  Maybe she won’t. We’re both adults now.

  Right. They had that in common, if nothing else, he reminded himself wryly. That and, oh yeah, irony of ironies: money.

  During their brief conversation, she had acted clueless about his life now—and he had pretended to be just as clueless about hers.

  Of course he knew she was an event planner in Manhattan—a successful one, judging by her address and her client list.

  Keeping track of her was simple, despite the fact that Wyatt’s parents were long deceased, his brothers had relocated, and he’d lost touch with his other hometown connections when he left.

  Google was a handy invention. Plug in someone’s name and poof! There they were: name, location, occupation…

  He only wished there had been a photo of Lindsay on the Web, but there never was when he checked.

  And he checked often.

  Well, now you don’t need a photo. Now you’ll get to see her for yourself.

  His right foot pressed down on the accelerator before he remembered to lighten up.

  This wasn’t a race. After twenty years, he could wait another half hour to see her.

  Yeah, sure you can.

  He forced himself to steer his way into the right lane, allowing the luxury sports car to languish behind a relatively slow-moving double semi.

  Why did she call him? What did she want? And in person, no less.

  Maybe she was interested in him now that she’d found out that he could now buy and sell her old man—and Farrell Timber—from here to the West Coast and back.

  She wouldn’t be the first opportunist from his past to resurface.

  Then again, Lindsay had never struck him as a gold-digger.

  Come on…she didn’t have to be.

  She had her own money, plenty of it. Everybody in Portland knew that money grew on the Farrell family tree.

  Anyway, information about Wyatt wasn’t readily available on the Internet. He was a silent partner in the business, importing exotic luxury cars for high-profile clients.

  Cars had always been his thing, even back in high school.

  That was how he first noticed Lindsay, in fact. He’d turned his head to admire a sleek black Porsche that had pulled up in front of church one Sunday morning before Mass. Then she’d emerged from the backseat, and he was instantly more captivated by her than the car. Which was saying a lot.

  In those days he worked his ass off, holding three part-time jobs to save enough for his used BMW. There were plenty of days when he got home at three a.m. after washing dishes at a local restaurant, too exhausted to wake up for school the next morning. You miss one too many days, and you’re expelled.

  And once you’ve been expelled from one school, the next one has a zero-tolerance policy. Get caught having a cigarette on school grounds, and you’re out. No excuses accepted, no questions asked.

  Of course college was beyond his reach anyway, so he didn’t worry much about his academic record. After graduating from Washington High, he found his way into automobile sales—first in Portland, then Indianapolis, then Daytona. Race cars.

  From there, he got into luxury imports, found his way up the East Coast through a series of stepping stones, and here he was. Still working his ass off.

  But the reward now was much greater. He was wealthy, living among blue bloods who made Lindsay’s privileged family look like paupers.

  It wasn’t about money, though. Not for Wyatt.

  And it wasn’t about Lindsay rejecting him all those years ago because he wasn’t good enough.

  It wasn’t even about his parents, who never believed in him, or his brothers, who didn’t either—until he sent them each a Jaguar for Christmas a few years back. Of course Shane promptly sold his to keep his L.A. townhouse from going into foreclosure, and Devin totaled his during an icy Montana rain that spring.

  Oh, well. Let bygones be bygones, Wyatt figured. No need to hold grudges.

  If Wyatt Goddard ever had anything to prove, it was to himself.

  He should have been satisfied now, a bon vivant living life on his own terms.

  He wasn’t.

  Not entirely.

  But he figured he was as close to satisfied as he was ever going to get on his own.

  Sure, something was missing. Something he couldn’t even put his finger on, most days.

  Today, however, he could.

  Maybe because Allison had moved out.

  More likely because Lindsay had contacted him.

  No, she wasn’t the thing that was missing, per se…

  It was just that hearing from her reminded him—far more than Allison’s departure had—that he was alone.

  Alone again, alone always…

  Alone.

  There were plenty of people in his life, but he held them at arm’s length, the way he always had. It was his nature. In his relationships with women, with family, with friends and colleagues.

  If he didn’t let them in, he didn’t have to push them out—or worse, let them out when they wanted to leave.

  He didn’t have to take Psych 101 to know that it was a defense mechanism, honed by years of being a latchkey kid with parents who were absent even when they were physically there. He had long ago forgiven both of them, quite some time before he found himself at their consecutive deathbeds, keeping vigil, holding it together while his older brothers fell apart and stayed away. His father went first: cirrhosis of the liver. No surprise. His mother followed within a year: emphysema. No surprise there, either.

  Wyatt had long since quit smoking, and he never touched a drop of liquor. Never did drugs, either, not even pot. Not even when he ran around with that crowd back in school.

  No, he was an expert at always remaining in control…

  Even at high speed.

  He checked the rearview mirror, glanced over his shoulder, then flicked on his turn signal and swerved left.

  Then he allowed his foot to sink onto the accelerator, gunning the sports car down the highway toward New York, and Lindsay.

  This was going to be tricky.

  She couldn’t help but wish Lindsay and Wyatt were going to meet at Lindsay’s apartment so that she could easily eavesdrop in the comfort of her Lexington Avenue hotel room a few blocks away.

  But when Wyatt said he was coming to New York right away, Lindsay immediately suggested meeting in a public place.

  She didn’t say it that way, of course.

  When he asked, “Where do you live?” she replied immediately, and nervously, “Oh, I’ll just meet you somewhere. I was going out to run some errands on the way to work, so…”

  Errands? On the way to work?

  No, you weren’t, Lindsay. You made that up—why? So that you wouldn’t have to meet Wyatt Goddard in your apartment?

  She could think of just two reasons a woman wouldn’t want to be alone with a man. One, because she was afraid he might hurt her.

  Two, because she was afraid he might make a move on her.

  With Wyatt Goddard, either scenario was a possibility.

  Not that he had ever hurt someone, to her knowledge. But there always was an air of danger about him.

  In fact, to her own private amusement, his name came up a few times in the wake of
Jake’s murder—as a suspect.

  Not officially, though the police did question him. But they questioned everyone who had been at the dance that night. Methodically. Taking more time with some kids—like Lindsay, who had found him, and Kristen, who had been his date—than with others.

  Wyatt was never an official suspect, but there was plenty of talk, particularly among Jake’s friends, that he could have done it. Mostly because he was an outsider, never one of them. And because he had been there that night, with Jake’s sister.

  Of course, she kept her distance from him after that.

  Pretty much everyone did.

  Then again, they all kept their distance from each other, too, their close-knit group hopelessly frayed as graduation loomed.

  By that July, everyone had gone their separate ways.

  This July, they were planning to come together again at last before the old school was destroyed.

  But some of them wouldn’t live to see that day.

  And those who did would be forever haunted by all that had gone before.

  Lindsay Farrell would be part of the former group.

  She hadn’t yet decided where Wyatt Goddard was going to wind up now that he was back on the scene.

  She’d just have to wait and see what happened between him and Lindsay.

  They were meeting just down this next block, in a large, popular coffee shop Lindsay had suggested. It would probably be crowded at this hour of the morning.

  Crowded enough that no one would give a second glance to a frumpy, heavyset blonde dining solo.

  But too crowded, she saw in dismay as she arrived in the doorway, for her to possibly land a seat anywhere near Lindsay and Wyatt.

  There they were, greeting each other right now at a small booth near the back, surrounded by other booths and tables, all of them occupied.

  Lindsay she had already glimpsed many times these last few days, having kept her under close surveillance. She had been seated when Wyatt arrived, her back to the door.

  Now, after they had exchanged a brief, awkward grasp of each other’s arms—which wasn’t a hug, but wasn’t anything else, either—Wyatt sat down facing the door, and she did a double take.

  She hadn’t seen him in twenty years.

  If she weren’t looking for him, expecting to see him there, it would have taken her a while to recognize him.