Married To A Stranger

by Connie Bennett

  Adam shook his head. “No. There were no relatives. No close ones, anyway. You were in a boarding school in New England at the time, and you stayed on there until you started college.”

  A young girl living alone at an impersonal boarding school. That would explain why isolation and loneliness felt so familiar to her. She gave Adam a nod, indicating that he should continue. He did, explaining how she’d dropped out of college after three years of studying archaeology and anthropology. Using the money from the substantial trust fund her parents had left her, she’d toured Europe and the Middle East, working on archaeological digs when the mood suited her and playing on the Riviera when it didn’t.

  Using only broad brush strokes, Adam painted a picture of a wealthy, rootless young woman with too much money, too much time on her hands and too few goals.

  Madeline didn’t like the picture. Nothing in her rebelled against it exactly, but it just didn’t feel right somehow.

  “So where do you come in?” she asked him. The ancient past could be explored later.

  “We met a little over ten years ago at the film festival in Cannes.”

  “You’re in the movie business?”

  Adam shook his head. “I’m an antiquities broker.”

  “So we met, fell in love and got married,” she said succinctly.

  “In a nutshell.”

  “And lived happily ever after until just a few days ago?”

  “More or less,” he replied softly.

  Maddy ignored the tenderness in his tone. “Where did we live?”

  “Most recently in Paris, but we travel a great deal.”

  “Because of your business?”

  “Our business,” Adam corrected her. “We’re partners now. Your specialty is Egyptian and Middle Eastern artifacts.”

  Madeline searched her memory for any knowledge of exactly what an antiquities “broker” did. “We accept commissions to find specific pieces for our clients’ collections?”

  “Basically,” he confirmed. “And sometimes we function as an intermediary between galleries or museums and certain private collectors who wish to remain anonymous.”

  “I see.” Madeline digested the information, but none of it sounded even remotely familiar to her.

  “We also had a successful gallery in Paris on the Rue des Jardins.”

  The Rue des Jardins. Street of Gardens. The translation came so easily to her that Maddy was startled. Learning that she spoke French wasn’t surprising, particularly if she’d been living in Paris, but she couldn’t help feeling excited. Something finally seemed familiar to her. “Speak to me in French,” she commanded.

  Adam looked at her blankly for a moment, then replied in flawlessly accented French, “Tu t’appelles Madeline Hopewell.”

  “Your name is Madeline Hopewell,” she translated, giving him a look of disgust. “Something a bit harder please.”

  “Tu as trente-quatre ans.”

  “You’re thirty-four years old,” she recited.

  “Tu es ma femme…“

  “You are my wife…”

  “Et je t’aime.”

  “And I love you.” Madeline’s breath caught in her throat, and she found it impossible to look away from Adam’s dark eyes. The raw emotion she saw made his words even more potent, more moving, and suddenly, she felt it herself—a sliver of the pain he was feeling. It wasn’t a memory of loving him, though. It was just a deep, aching sadness for the loss she couldn’t remember or even feel. For the first time it seemed possible that Adam really was her husband.

  “I’m sorry, Adam,” she whispered. “I wish…”

  He nodded. “I know. It’s okay. You’ll remember soon.”

  “I hope so,” she said, then determinedly pulled herself away from the emotions Adam’s declaration had evoked. She couldn’t afford to get mired in sentiment. “You were going to explain how a wife can be missing for nearly a week without her husband knowing it.”

  Adam opened his mouth, but before he could reply a voice from the door said gruffly, “I’d like to know the answer to that, too.”

  Adam spun around. “Who are you?” he demanded, placing himself between the intruder and Maddy.

  But it was Maddy who answered him. “Adam, this is Detective Hogan of the Charleston police. He’s in charge of my case.”

  The short, brawny detective moved toward the bed, never taking his eyes off Adam. “Now, who are you?” Hogan asked.

  Adam didn’t offer his hand to the suspicious detective. “I’m Maddy’s husband. Adam Hopewell.”

  Hogan looked at Maddy. “Is that right, Ms. Hope-well? Do you remember him?”

  She shook her head regretfully. “No. I don’t remember him.”

  The detective looked at Adam again. “Then how about showing me a little identification?”

  Adam sighed impatiently as he reached into the pocket of his suit coat. “I’ve already been through this with the officer outside.”

  “Go through it again,” Hogan growled.

  As she watched Adam hand over his wallet, Maddy silently berated herself for not thinking of this herself. The detective went through the wallet thoroughly, apparently satisfying himself that the visitor was who he claimed to be, but when Hogan passed the wallet back to Adam, Maddy held out her hand. “May I see it, too?”

  Adam looked hurt, but Maddy was more concerned with protecting herself than worrying about the feelings of this man who said he was her husband. Adam’s tenderness and solicitude had made her forget that for a moment, but she wasn’t about to make the same mistake again.

  Without asking for approval from Adam, Hogan gave the wallet to Maddy.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Adam snapped. “Why would I claim to be her husband if I wasn’t?”

  Hogan looked at Adam unapologetically. “If I was a killer who wanted to finish what I started, I’d need a creative way to get past the guard at the door.”

  “I didn’t try to kill Maddy! I wasn’t even in the country at the time!”

  Hogan’s shaggy eyebrows lifted skeptically. “Oh? Can you prove that?”

  Adam’s jaw stiffened. “Not at the moment. My passport is in my suitcase in the car. Do you want me to go out to the parking garage and get it for you?”

  “Eventually,” Hogan replied with a nod. “But for now, I’ll settle for an answer to the question Ms. Hopewell asked when I came in. What took you so long to realize she was missing?”

  Maddy had been listening to their exchange with half an ear as she studied the contents of Adam’s wallet. His American driver’s license had the same invalid New York address as hers, and the rest of his identification proved his contention that he’d been living in France. But the most convincing evidence was the small, candid photograph of her that was encased in a protective plastic pocket alongside his credit cards.

  This man really was her husband.

  She replaced the contents of the wallet and returned her full attention to Adam as he answered the detective’s question.

  “As I was telling Maddy, we’d decided to leave Paris and return to New York to live,” Adam began, turning to Maddy and virtually ignoring Hogan. “We’ve been in the process of moving for the past two months—packing, wrapping up business details and closing down our gallery on the Rue des Jardins. In the middle of all that mayhem, one of our best clients decided to sell his entire collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. He asked us to quickly and quietly find buyers for the pieces.”

  “I take it you’re an antique dealer,” Hogan said.

  Maddy couldn’t help but grin when Adam shot the detective a look of disgust. “An antiquities broker.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” Hogan said in a la-di-da tone.

  Again Adam ignored him and turned to Maddy. “Anyway, the commission was too good to pass up, so we agreed that you would finish closing our Paris apartment while I made the person-to-person contacts needed to sell the collection. We planned to rendezvous in New York on the twenty-sixth. Yesterday.” />
  “So you had no contact with your wife during that time?” Hogan asked.

  Adam reluctantly swung his gaze to the detective. “On the contrary. I spoke to her several times. The last time we talked, she said she was ready to put our belongings in storage, and the landlord had already found new tenants for the apartment.”

  “She gave you no indication that anything was wrong or that she planned to leave Paris ahead of schedule?”

  “No. She even joked that she wasn’t going to let Monsieur Rennart evict her before she was ready to leave.”

  “Which was?”

  “She had reservations on the Concord for the twenty-sixth.”

  “Will you two please stop talking about me as though I’m not here?” Maddy asked sharply.

  Adam turned to her instantly. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said, reaching down to caress her hand.

  Maddy tensed but didn’t pull away from his light touch. “When was the last time we spoke?” she asked.

  His brow furrowed in thought. “Ten days ago, I think. Or possibly eleven. I tried to call you a couple of days later, but the phone had been disconnected. I’d been expecting that eventually, and I knew you had my itinerary, so I didn’t try to leave a message for you with any of our friends.”

  “Did she leave a message for you anywhere?” Hogan asked.

  “No,” Adam replied. “But I’ve been in four hotels on three different continents this past week, so I suppose it’s possible that a message could have been sent that I missed.”

  “And you don’t have any idea why I came to Charleston?” Maddy asked him.

  “No.”

  “If you didn’t expect Mrs. Hopewell to be in Charleston, how did you find her here?” Hogan asked. “Did you contact the New York police and file a missing-persons report?”

  “I tried,” Adam told him, “but from their perspective she hadn’t been missing twenty-four hours yet, so they wouldn’t take a report.”

  “What do you mean, ‘from their perspective’?” Hogan asked.

  “Maddy was supposed to meet me at the hotel in New York yesterday afternoon, and the police insisted that I give her at least a day to show up before I filed a report,” he explained. “They wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell them that she’d already been missing for several days.”

  “How did.you know that?” Hogan inquired.

  “When she didn’t show up at the hotel, I checked with the airline and discovered that she wasn’t on the flight she had planned to take yesterday. That’s when I started calling friends in Paris and learned that no one had heard from her for at least a week. Our former landlord said she vacated the apartment on Saturday, the nineteenth.”

  Hogan made the calculations. “That would’ve been a couple of days after you talked to her last and a full week before you were supposed to meet in New York?”

  “Yes. But since I’d been out of contact with Maddy during that week, the New York police refused to believe she’d been missing that long.”

  “Well, if the police didn’t run a check and discover that we had put her in the FBI computer, how did you find her in Charleston?”

  “After I had exhausted all possibilities with the police in New York and Paris, as well as all our friends in Europe, I played a hunch out of pure desperation.”

  Hogan’s craggy face registered disbelief. “What kind of hunch? Are you sure you didn’t just stick a pin in a map and call the police station there?”

  Adam regarded him with annoyance. “No, of course not. But Maddy and I had made plans to come to Charleston next month. We have reservations at Bride’s Bay.”

  Maddy frowned. “Bride’s Bay?”

  “It’s a ritzy resort on Jermain Island,” Hogan said, “just off the coast from Charleston.”

  “It’s also where Maddy and I spent our honey-moon,” Adam informed him. “We were going to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary there.” Again Maddy saw the sadness in his eyes. “Anyway, I thought perhaps you’d decided to skip New York and head for the resort early, so I called them. They hadn’t heard from you, but I spoke to the manager to explain that you were missing and request that I be notified if they did hear from you. Then Ms. Jermain, the manager, remembered seeing a story on the evening news about the police trying to locate family or friends of a woman who was attacked at the airport, but she couldn’t recall her name.”

  “So you called the police station.”

  Adam nodded. “I was told Maddy was in the hospital. I caught the next plane to Charleston, rented a car at the airport and drove straight here.” Adam squared his shoulders. “Now that I’ve answered your questions, I have a few of my own, Detective Hogan. Like what you’re doing to catch the man who attacked Maddy.”

  “We’re doing everything we can, Mr. Hopewell, but I’m afraid we don’t have much to go on. No one got a good look at him or the license plate of his car,” Hogan replied. “Can you think of any reason someone would want to kill your wife? Do either of you have any enemies?”

  “No. On both counts,” Adam replied.

  “Okay.” Hogan gave a noncommittal nod. “Can you think of any reason the Drug Enforcement Administration would be interested in your wife?”

  “What?!” Maddy exclaimed, sitting up so quickly it made her head throb. “The DEA has been asking questions about me?”

  Hogan nodded. “Day before yesterday two agents showed up at the station asking questions about you and your assailant.”

  Adam was scowling at the detective. “How did the DEA even know about the attack?”

  “When your wife couldn’t give us any information about herself, we put her description into the FBI computer to try and match her with missing persons around the country. The DEA agents said she matched the description of a woman known to be acting as a courier for a Colombian drug cartel.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” Maddy demanded.

  “After they went through your belongings, they came here to interrogate you, but you were asleep. Once they got a look at you, they said you weren’t the woman they were looking for and left.”

  Maddy was relieved but not mollified. “That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Dr. Manion asked me not to,” Hogan explained. “He didn’t want you upset.”

  “Then why mention it now?” Adam confronted the detective. “Obviously she was cleared of any implications of wrongdoing. Why upset her for no reason?”

  “Because there was something fishy about those two agents. Their credentials checked out and I can’t put my finger on what bugged me about them, but I know when I’m being lied to—and those two agents were lying. I just don’t know why. Yet.”

  “Detective Hogan? What’s going on here?” Dr. Manion demanded as he entered the room.

  “Just trying to get some answers, Doc,” the detective replied.

  “Well, get them some other time.” Manion hurried to Maddy’s bed. “Are you both blind? Can’t you see what you’re doing to this patient?”

  “I’m fine, Dr. Manion,” Maddy assured him.

  “No, you’re not, Maddy,” Adam argued, his face lined with concern. “The doctor’s right. We’ve exhausted you.”

  Maddy started to argue with him, but she found she didn’t have the strength. Her headache had grown a hundred times worse in the past few minutes, and she felt as though someone had siphoned off every bit of her meager supply of energy.

  “I want both of you out of here now,” Manion ordered.

  “All right,” Adam said, stepping closer to the head of Maddy’s bed. “I’ll come back later this afternoon.”

  “No, you’ll come back tomorrow,” Manion countered. “She’s had enough visitors for one day.”

  Adam frowned at him. “But—”

  “I’m in charge here, Mr. Hopewell,” the doctor reminded him sternly. “You can see your wife again tomorrow morning.”

  With her husband and her doctor glaring at each other over
her bed, Maddy felt like a fraying rope in a game of tug-of-war. “He’s right, Adam,” she said gently. Her husband shifted his gaze down to her, and the harsh lines of his face melted into a look of tenderness that Maddy could very easily become addicted to. “I need a chance to assimilate everything you’ve told me. I still have a thousand questions, but they can wait till tomorrow.”

  “All right, Maddy,” Adam said, taking her hand. “I’ll settle into a hotel somewhere close by and let the nurses know where I am in case you need to reach me.”

  “Good.”

  As he looked down at her, his face filled with uncertainty. “Then I guess I’ll go now,” he said reluctantly.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.” He nodded. Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he leaned down and pressed his lips to hers.

  It wasn’t a passionate kiss, or even an insistent one. Just a simple brush of his lips against hers, but it caught Maddy completely by surprise. Not because he did it, but because of the way she responded. That warm, simple contact made her want more.

  But Adam didn’t linger. He straightened and gently touched her face, smoothing back a wisp of hair from her cheek. “Get some rest, darling,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I love you.”

  Maddy felt tears stinging her eyes as, with obvious reluctance, he released her hand and turned toward the door.

  Maddy’s hand still felt warm from his touch, and the sensation reminded her of something that had puzzled her earlier.

  “Adam?”

  He stopped and turned to her expectantly. “Yes?”

  “Why don’t I have a wedding ring?”

  He gave her a sweet, loving smile. “You have one, Maddy. You just don’t wear it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re stubborn and independent, and you don’t believe in antiquated chauvinistic rituals. When we got married, you said you wouldn’t let anyone brand you like a heifer.”

  Her gaze dropped to Adam’s left hand. “You’re wearing a ring.”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t mind being branded—as long as it’s your brand I’m wearing.”