Fugitive Hearts

by Ingrid Weaver

  The last time he had seen this street had been the day after the guilty verdict. It had been a gray November dawn. Through the back window of the prison van, he’d watched the closed stores and empty park benches slip past like neighbors turning their backs. It was a feeling that hadn’t been due entirely to his imagination.

  The Haineses had never trusted him. They had tolerated him because he’d fathered their only grandchild, but they had disapproved of their daughter’s marriage from the start. They’d had higher hopes for Sylvia. She was supposed to choose a man who belonged to the country club, not one who had been hired to build the club’s new addition.

  Remy glanced critically at his reflection in the rearview mirror, then took one hand off the wheel to turn up the collar of the down-filled ski jacket he had found at the back of Derek’s closet. It was shiny silver, fancier than anything he usually wore—he thought it made him look like a well-off yuppie on vacation. The sunglasses he’d found in the glove compartment helped, too. So did having an innocent-looking blonde sitting on the seat beside him, but he didn’t want to push his luck. He continued down the street until he reached the crossroads at the edge of town, then turned left at the municipal works yard.

  Five minutes later he slowed as they neared the chain link fence that enclosed Leverette Construction. There wasn’t much left, only the small trailer that he’d hauled to job sites and the square cement-block building that had served as his office. No one had bothered to lock the gate or plow the yard where his equipment had been stored, probably because there was no longer any equipment.

  Exhaust puffed past them in a white cloud as Remy let the engine idle. He’d known his father-in-law had laid off the workers and disposed of the assets of his company shortly after the guilty verdict had been handed down. Acting as Sylvia’s executor—and as the banker who had financed Remy’s company—Edgar Haines hadn’t wasted any time wreaking his own personal vengeance on the man he believed to be his daughter’s killer. The business that Remy had spent a decade building had been wiped out by the stroke of a pen.

  Remy couldn’t really blame him. If anyone ever hurt Chantal, he would probably want to do a lot worse than merely destroy the man’s company.

  He switched the truck into four-wheel drive and eased the heavy vehicle through the snowdrift that spanned the gates. When they reached the office, he gunned the engine and yanked hard on the wheel, spinning the truck in a circle so that they faced out the way they had come.

  Dana quickly flattened her palms against the dashboard to keep from leaning into him. “What are you doing?”

  “Making sure we can leave in a hurry if we have to.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s what’s left of Leverette Construction.”

  “How are you going to get in? You wouldn’t have a key…” Her words trailed off and she frowned. “Silly me. You didn’t have a key to the lodge or Derek’s suite, either.”

  “One of the skills I learned in my misspent youth.” He shut off the engine and got out.

  “I’ll wait here,” Dana said.

  He slammed his door and went around to open hers.

  She pressed back into the seat. “I said I’ll wait here,” she repeated.

  He held out his hand to help her down. “It’ll get too cold to sit in the truck.”

  “Not if you leave the heater on.” She held out her own hand, palm up. “Give me the keys.”

  “Sorry, I can’t do that.”

  “You still don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t think you’d turn me in, but the way you’ve been glaring at me for the past hour, I wouldn’t be surprised if you decided to drive off and leave me stranded.”

  “I don’t know how to drive a stick shift.”

  He couldn’t afford to believe her. He grasped her hand and hauled her out.

  She landed off balance against his chest. Remy reacted immediately, wrapping his arms around her and bracing his legs apart to steady himself. “Careful,” he said, holding her close. “There’s a layer of ice under the snow.”

  “I wouldn’t have slipped if you had waited for me to get down on my own,” she said into his coat. She pushed a fist into his stomach. “Let go of me, Remy.”

  “Josh,” he corrected, dropping his arms and stepping back. “Or darling or sweetheart.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you calling me Remy in public.”

  Instead of using his name—any of them—or an endearment, she pulled up the hood of her parka and followed him to the office door.

  He was seeing a different side of Dana from the generous innocent he had first thought she was. Her temper surprised him—there was obviously a well of passion beneath the gentleness she had displayed during their first days together. She was going along with him, but she was making it clear that she wasn’t happy about it. No, that was an understatement. His sweet, gentle Dana looked as if she would happily back the truck over him.

  Her anger was understandable, considering the way he had coerced her. He wished that he could tell her he would never carry out his threat to implicate her as his accomplice, but what would be the point? He needed her cooperation, not her approval. It didn’t matter what she thought of him, right?

  Sure. Maybe if he told himself that enough times, he’d be able to convince himself.

  Using the tools he’d brought with him from the garage, Remy had the door of the building open in less than a minute. Even though he had been expecting it, he still was jarred to see the condition of his office. The phones, the computer, the photocopier…everything of value had been stripped away. The drawers of the filing cabinets and his desk hung open, papers spilling haphazardly onto the floor.

  Dana pushed back her hood as she moved beside him. “What happened here?” she asked. “Who could have done this?”

  “Take your pick,” he said. “Kids, Sylvia’s friends or relatives, anyone.”

  “What a mess.”

  “Yeah.” He left his boots by the door so that he wouldn’t track snow over the papers and went to the storage room. Not much was left there, either, but he did find some garbage bags and two stray cardboard boxes. He returned to the filing cabinet and began removing what was left inside and stuffing it into one of the boxes. “We can’t afford the time to sort through all this here,” he said. “I’m going to grab what I can and take it back to the cabin.”

  “Exactly what kind of evidence do you think you’ll find?”

  “I’m hoping there might be some paper trail that could support my alibi. I don’t believe my lawyer looked very hard.” He found a file of telephone bills and emptied it into the box. “The day of Sylvia’s murder, I was waiting to meet a potential client at a lakefront building lot. He had phoned me the day before to give me directions, claimed he wanted to talk about building a cottage, but he never showed up.”

  “Couldn’t he have testified that he was supposed to meet you?”

  “I took his call myself. No one else talked to him. The name and phone number I took down turned out to be dead ends, so either I had copied it down wrong and the guy changed his mind about the job—” he slammed the filing cabinet shut and went over to his desk “—or someone wanted to be sure I was out of town.”

  “Are you saying that man might have been the real murderer?”

  Should he tell her his theory? Given Dana’s present state of mind, what would be the point? There had been no evidence to support his suspicions of who had killed Sylvia any more than there had been evidence of his alibi. “Yes, it’s a good possibility. I had no reason to suspect anything at the time, since a lot of my business involved building vacation homes for people from the city. It was only afterward that I started to think I’d been set up.”

  She hesitated. “It’s also possible that you made up the whole story.”

  He shot her an impatient look. “That’s what the prosecution claimed, but why would I risk my neck to come to this office to look for something t
hat I knew didn’t exist? Why would I need to pretend for you?”

  “Maybe you want to be sure I’ll cooperate.”

  “Now who’s insulting whose intelligence?”

  Dana didn’t reply. She watched him in silence as he went through his desk. Finally she toed off her boots and grabbed one of the garbage bags. Squatting down, she started scooping papers from the floor.

  Remy paused briefly to watch her. She was helping him. Did this mean she finally believed his claim of innocence? Or was she worried that she might get caught along with him if they stayed here too long?

  He told himself it didn’t matter, but he didn’t believe that now any more than he had before. It did matter. He didn’t want to see that mixture of hurt and suspicion in her gaze when she looked at him. He wanted to see her smile again. And the next time he took her in his arms, he didn’t want her to fight him….

  The next time? He finished filling the first box and started on the next. Even if he convinced Dana that he hadn’t killed his wife, it might not make any difference to her opinion of him. As far as she was concerned, he didn’t have to be a murderer to be a first-class bastard.

  Chapter 9

  “The story’s taking a few twists I hadn’t expected, but I’ll get it done, Gillian.” Dana shifted the phone to her other ear. “When have I ever missed a deadline?”

  “Did I say I was worried?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Dana, I didn’t call to nag.”

  Dana bit the inside of her cheek, regretting her defensiveness. Gillian Wychuk was a wonderfully supportive agent. She never nagged, and she never bullied. She trusted Dana to handle the creative side of producing books while she stuck to the business side. “Sorry. I guess I’m a little tired.”

  There was a pause. “Is everything all right?” Gillian asked.

  Dana glanced at where Remy sat on the couch. He was still going through the papers they had brought from his office the previous day. He’d sorted the mess into various piles that he’d placed on the floor, but she didn’t know how he’d be able to find anything worthwhile.

  The whole idea was a long shot anyway, and he was smart enough to know it, yet he had been busy long after she had gone to bed last night and had already been working at it when she’d gotten up this morning. The bruised skin under his eyes and the stubble of his unshaved beard made her wonder whether he had slept at all.

  “Dana? Are you still there?”

  She turned her attention back to the phone. “Yes. Sorry. Everything’s fine and dandy, Gillian. Peachy keen and tickety-boo as always.”

  Another pause. “Dana, if you want me to talk to your editor about getting more time—”

  “No,” she said immediately. “This is what I do. It’s all I do. I enjoy it. I don’t want to stop.”

  “Okay, okay.” There was a light laugh. “I wouldn’t want you to. I’m only calling to find out where you want me to send your check.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It’s the advance for Mortimer and the Pirate Mice. I wasn’t sure how much longer you were going to be up in the boonies, so I thought you might want me to send it directly to you there instead of to your home address.”

  She thought for a moment. With the free rent and food she was getting here in exchange for her caretaking duties, she wasn’t in any immediate need of money.

  Remy could use some, though. He was going to need a competent lawyer before this was all over. Dana had seen for herself how his father-in-law had stripped his business bare. If he’d had the money for a proper defense, he might not have been convicted in the first place.

  Yet money might not have made that much of a difference. From the sound of it, the evidence had been overwhelmingly stacked against him. It was almost too incriminating to be believed…as if someone had planned it that way.

  She dropped her head in her hand. No wonder the plot of her book was taking a few unexpected twists. It was merely reflecting the convoluted tangle of the rest of her life. “You might as well mail it up here, Gillian,” she answered finally. “Care of Half Moon Bay Resort. I’ll pick it up at the post office the next time I’m in Hainesborough.”

  Remy looked up and frowned when she finished the phone call. “You’re not going into town on your own,” he said.

  She was about to snap at him, but instead she sighed. Being angry all the time was too draining. She had kept it up for more than a day now, and she simply didn’t have the energy anymore. “You made sure I can’t use my car, and I don’t know how to drive Derek’s truck. You pack up this phone when you’re not around and you hide the keys to the lodge, so I can’t call a cab. What’s next?” She held out her hands. “Are you going to tie me up so I can’t walk away?”

  “Don’t tempt me, Dana. I might take you up on that suggestion.”

  Shaking her head, she moved away from the phone. “I don’t want to argue, Remy, but I’m getting sick and tired of you issuing orders.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Yes, it is, and it isn’t necessary. I’ve cooperated with you so far, haven’t I?”

  He nodded. “You have.”

  “Like you said, we’re in this together now. I don’t want to get my name and reputation dragged through the courts any more than you want to go back to prison. We’ve already established that, haven’t we?”

  He nodded again.

  “So let’s move on.”

  “And how would you suggest we do that?”

  “For starters, you can stop bossing me around.”

  “All right.” He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Dana?”

  “What?”

  “When you want to go into Hainesborough, would you let me drive you, please?”

  There was still an underlying tone of command in his voice, but at least he had phrased it as a request. He’d even said please. “I’ll consider it,” she said. “How’s your evidence search coming?”

  In reply, he held out the paper he had been studying.

  She crossed the floor to take it from him. The small piece of lined paper looked as if it had been torn out of a notebook. It was creased and smudged, but she could still read several sets of numbers that had been penciled across the top. “What’s this?”

  “My mileage log.”

  She pulled up an ottoman and sat down to face him. “What does it mean?”

  “See the numbers across the top of the page? That’s the date.”

  “April seventeenth of last year,” she read.

  “It was the day of the murder.”

  “Oh.”

  He leaned closer to point out the next two sets of numbers. “I kept track of the distance from my office to the job site. This is the reading when I left, and this is when I returned. There’s a difference of almost thirty-four kilometres. And see down here in the margin?” he asked, tapping against more scrawled numbers.

  She tilted her head and squinted. “Not really.”

  “My handwriting isn’t the greatest, but those are the times.”

  “Then this should back up your alibi,” she said immediately.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why?”

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “If you think like a Hainesborough cop, I could have made up those numbers, or I could have written them in right now. I could have fabricated the whole thing.”

  “No, you couldn’t have. I would have seen you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. A judge would never buy it. It’s not definitive proof.”

  She smoothed the creases from the paper. It wasn’t definitive enough for the courts, but it did support his story as far as she was concerned.

  The doubts about Remy’s innocence that she had clung to yesterday had been steadily fading along with her anger. Her heart had believed in him from the beginning. Her brain was rapidly following suit.

  Yet she still wasn’t completely ready to trust either one.

  And why should she? His
threats had guaranteed her cooperation, whether she believed he was guilty or not. It might be cowardly to continue avoiding the issue, but it sure was easier.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It isn’t proof.”

  “I was hoping to find a receipt or the credit card bill for the gas I bought that day. I’ve been through everything we brought from the office, but there’s nothing like that here.”

  Could someone have already taken those receipts? Was that why his office had looked like ground zero of a tornado? “What are you going to do?”

  He rubbed his face, his palms scraping over his stubbled cheeks. “I’m going to try one more thing. Some correspondence might have trickled in after my father-in-law shut down the business. With all the other evidence against me, the police wouldn’t have any reason to seize the mail, so anything that came in should still be there. The box is paid up until next month.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “At the Hainesborough Post Office.”

  “Are you nuts?” she asked. “You can’t break in there, it’s a federal building. If you get caught—”

  “What’s the worst they could do to me, throw me in prison for life?” He put his hand on her knee. “Relax, Dana. I wasn’t planning on breaking in. We’re going to walk in together.”

  “And that makes it better?”

  “All I need is a minute near the box. It’s too late today. We’ll get there tomorrow just before closing time. Most people will have already picked up their mail. No one’s going to be suspicious of the famous author who happens to be the caretaker of the Half Moon Bay Resort and her fiancé.”

  “But a post office? Remy, your mug shot is going to be on the wall.”

  He moved his hand higher and spread his fingers over her thigh. “Then we’ll have to put on a very convincing act.”

  She glanced down at his hand. Right. Their act. Could she be a convincing fiancée when she had spent the last day doing her best to hate him?

  “So have you considered it yet?”

  “Considered what?”

  “Whether or not you will let me drive you into Hainesborough. I did ask, Dana, I didn’t order.”