Holly frowned at the possibility of someone, perhaps Jacinta’s stepfather, taking vigilante action. He wouldn’t be the only possibility, though; there were plenty of people in town who wanted to see Noel Maynard dead or gone.
‘Come on.’ Holly picked up her car keys. ‘I’ll give you a lift home. You’d better have some back-up while you tell your folks the truth. Might as well be me.’
‘You sure you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve got nothing else planned.’
It wasn’t a pleasant scene at the Jensens’ when Jacinta dropped her bombshell. Holly hated every minute of it but she stuck it out for the teenager’s sake, finally extricating herself once the shouting and recriminations had died down. Instead of returning to the cottage, she took the road to Betty Maynard’s. She couldn’t help wondering how the poor old woman was dealing with the news of her son’s serious injuries.
When she drove up over the ridge that led to the old house she saw that another car was parked outside, an old-model beaten up Ford that looked as if it had gone around the clock a few times.
Holly went to the door and knocked, but no one answered. She pressed her ear to the door to listen for any sound of movement inside but it was eerily quiet. She looked down at the rusty doorknob. Should she go in? What if the old lady had fallen or even had a heart attack in shock at the news of her son’s accident?
She turned the handle and opened the door a crack. ‘Mrs Maynard? It’s me, Holly Saxby. Are you all right?’
‘There’s no one home,’ a voice said from behind her on the veranda.
Holly swung around to see a man in his late sixties standing in the bright sunlight, a pair of sunglasses shielding his eyes. He looked vaguely familiar but she couldn’t quite place him. ‘I’m sorry…Do I know you?’ she asked.
‘You met my wife this morning.’
Grant Shoreham was twenty-five years older than the photographs she’d seen of him and Lisa in the newspaper articles documenting their daughter’s death, but no wonder she’d thought he was familiar.
Holly hesitated over offering him her hand and introducing herself formally. He looked uncomfortable in her presence as it was, no doubt because of last night’s incident, if not because of the rumours he’d heard about her regarding his daughter’s murderer. The pain on his face was evident in spite of the heavily tinted sunglasses. His whole body seemed to be almost bent double with it, the grief of the years weighing him down.
‘Mr Shoreham…’ she began awkwardly. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for causing you and your wife any hurt…I was just confused over some results that came in…I wanted to make sure everything was—’
‘I thought you’d come here,’ he said, cutting her off, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘I knew you’d come to see the old lady but you’re too late.’
Holly felt her stomach tilt sideways. ‘W-what do you mean I’m too late? Has something happened to her?’
He didn’t answer; instead he stepped out of the sun and made his way past her on the veranda to enter the house.
She turned and followed him inside. ‘Mr Shoreham?’
He reached for the back of a chair with one shaking hand to steady himself as he faced her, his face pinched with sadness. ‘You shouldn’t have come to Baronga Beach. We were finally starting to put our lives together and now you’ve torn them apart.’
‘I’m sorry…’
‘You don’t understand how it’s been,’ he went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘For years I’ve tried to forget but it just won’t go away.’
‘I understand…’ Holly inserted softly.
He suddenly slammed his hand on the worn table, his expression darkening with anger. ‘How can you possibly understand?’
‘I—I understand you’ve suffered terribly in the loss of your daughter,’ she said, trying to soothe him, but he became even more agitated.
‘The loss?’ He almost spat the words at her. ‘She wasn’t lost like a sock in the wash. She was murdered.’
Holly swallowed nervously. ‘Y-yes…I mean your daughter’s murder.’
He gave a cracked bark of odd-sounding laughter and Holly wondered if he was on the edge of a complete breakdown. He certainly was acting like it. His movements were jerky and agitated and she imagined his eyes behind those dark glasses were shifting all over the place as he tried to hold himself together.
‘I really don’t want to do this…’ he said after a tight silence, his voice breaking on the words. ‘My wife likes you…she says you’re just what this place needs, but I can’t let you do this to us. Not now. Not after all we’ve been through.’
Holly stared at him, trying to make sense of his words. She was about to ask him what he meant when, to her absolute horror, he reached for a knife that was lying on the bench closest to him and came stumbling towards her.
She stepped backwards in shock but tripped over the worn linoleum on the floor at the door. She cracked her head on one of the legs of the table but somehow managed to escape the first stab of the knife as it lunged towards her. She rolled away and pushed one of the rickety chairs at him but he was still coming. Fear filled her throat until she could hardly breathe and her stomach threatened to liquefy in panic.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she gasped, blocking him with the table. She was cornered now but at least he’d have to climb on the table to get her. She tried to reassure herself that he looked too frail and sickly to be able to do that but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances.
‘You’ve left me no choice,’ he said, looking for a way to get to her. ‘You’ve ruined everything, don’t you see? You’re making people doubt and I’m not having that. Not after all this time, not after all we’ve suffered.’
‘Please, Mr Shoreham, let’s talk about this like sensible adults. Put down the knife…please. I know you don’t really want to hurt me. Your wife told me you only did the chicken thing to scare me. I know you’re sorry. It’s all right. I’m not going to press charges.’
‘Put the knife down, Grant,’ Cameron said from the door.
Holly almost collapsed in relief and would have fallen to the floor if the table hadn’t been in the way.
Grant Shoreham turned and faced Cameron, the knife still in his hand. ‘Don’t make me kill you as well, Dr McCarrick. Lisa would never forgive me if I had to do that.’
‘She’s not going to forgive you anyway, is she, Grant?’ Cameron asked.
Holly held her breath against the tension in the small, dark, dusty room.
‘You killed Tina, didn’t you?’ Cameron went on in the same calm, even tone.
Holly watched as Grant Shoreham began to crumple, the knife slipping from his hand to drop at his feet.
‘I didn’t mean to do it…’ The old man’s sobs were heart-wrenching as he put his head in his hands. ‘She was disobeying my orders by continuing to see that filthy Maynard boy. I followed her here…I was going to threaten Maynard with the knife. When I put my hands around her neck to stop her from shouting out to warn Maynard she grabbed it out of my pocket…I tried to grab it but she twisted around…It went so deep into her stomach I panicked. She was dead before I could go for help…Lisa can’t ever find out I did it…’
‘So you let an innocent man go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit?’ Holly finally found her voice.
He gave a miserable nod. ‘I had to…There was no other choice…Then Maynard confessed…God knows why.’ He sank to the nearest chair and started shaking. ‘I ran him down on the back road. I had to stop people finding out…If he was dead it would all go away again. I had to make it all go away again…I had to…’
Cameron picked up the knife from the floor and secured it before coming over to where the old man was seated. ‘The blood that connected Maynard to your daughter wasn’t his, was it, Grant?’
He shook his head and continued to quietly sob.
‘That’s why you haven’t been to see Dr Cooper since your daughter’s de
ath. Or me, for the past four years. You’ve refused to come in for a check-up even though your health has been pretty obviously deteriorating,’ Cameron continued.
Grant nodded again, the tears streaming unheeded down his face.
Holly watched as Cameron took the sunglasses off the old man’s face and looked into his eyes. Even from her cramped spot behind the table she could see the telltale copper-coloured Kaiser-Fleischer rings in his eyes. Wilson’s disease.
‘Where’s Betty Maynard?’ Cameron asked the slumped figure in the chair.
‘In the boot of my car…tied up…I was going to torch it.’
Cameron took out his mobile and pressed rapid-dial for Rob and an ambulance, his eyes going to Holly’s.
Holly listened as he relayed the situation, her heart chugging with the aftershock of fear at what could have been her fate if Cameron hadn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together in time.
It seemed an age before the ambulance and Rob arrived, but finally it was over. A traumatized Betty was taken away in the ambulance and Grant Shoreham was taken into custody.
‘I’ll organise for someone to collect your car later,’ Cameron said as he led Holly to his four-wheel drive vehicle. ‘You’re in no fit state to drive.’
‘How did you figure it out?’ She turned in her seat to look at him once they were on their way.
‘Don’t go giving me the credit, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘You were the one who set the ball in motion. I just started to see a pattern in the way that ball was bouncing, that’s all.’ He gave her a quick glance. ‘I had a phone call from Clinton Jensen, who told me Jacinta had confessed to you that it hadn’t been Noel who’d attacked her. For a time there I was starting to think Clinton might’ve taken the law into his own hands. But then I wondered if it might have been Geoffrey Cooper. He seemed to be overreacting to the news of your visit to his father. I think we’ll find that Neville Cooper had discovered his mistake over the diagnosis he made but before he could do anything about it he had a stroke. That would explain why he was so upset at your questions about Noel and his treatment. He would’ve heard Noel had been released but in his state of health he had no way of destroying the records.’
‘Do you think Geoffrey Cooper knew anything about it?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t like the guy that much, but that’s for more personal reasons.’
‘Oh?’ She turned to look at him again.
‘Yeah,’ he said with a smile. ‘How dare he ask my girl out for a drink and then stand her up?’
Holly swallowed. ‘Your girl?’
‘That’s if you want to be, of course,’ he added as he pulled into his driveway.
She waited until he came around to her side to help her out before asking, ‘And how long do you want me to be your…your girl?’
‘To tell you the truth, sweetheart, I would much prefer you to be my wife, but since I’ve only known you, what is it now…five days, I thought you might think I was stark raving mad for proposing so soon.’
Holly blinked. ‘Y-your wife?’
‘I love you, Holly. I love everything about you. I love the way you told me off for overtaking you that first day. I think that might be when I first fell in love with you, or maybe it was when I pulled you out of the water at the beach with your hair all sandy and your make-up running. You looked so cute. I love that you defended a man everyone had written off as guilty. I love that you care for your patients with your whole heart and I love the way you are smiling at me right now. Does it mean what I think it means?’
‘What do you think it means?’
He gathered her into his arms and lowered his head to hers. ‘I could be wrong, but I think you might have just agreed to marry me. Am I right?’
Holly pressed her lips to his in a hot little kiss. She looked into his eyes and smiled. ‘You are most definitely right, Dr McCarrick.’
EPILOGUE
THE whole town seemed to be there for the wedding three months later. Holly could see all the familiar smiling faces as she came up the aisle on her father’s arm towards Cameron, who, dressed in a suit, looked breathtakingly handsome. Noel Maynard, still on crutches, and Harry Winston, his two groomsmen, were standing somewhat nervously by his side.
Holly’s eyes went to Jacinta Jensen and Belinda Proctor, who were acting as assistants to her bridesmaids, her friends from Medical School, Annabelle and Jodie.
Her mother was dabbing at tears next to Betty Maynard, who was grinning from ear to ear, her daughter Nell standing by her side. Cameron’s sister Freya was winking at her mischievously from the row in front and even Major Dixon was standing there next to Rob Aldridge, his back ramrod straight, his hand lifted in a salute as she went past.
Holly’s gaze went to where Cameron’s parents were standing in the pew at the front, holding hands, their love for each other, in spite of the tragedy they’d faced all those years ago, clear for all to see.
Her heart felt too big for her chest as she took her place by Cameron’s side, his hand reaching for hers and giving it a little squeeze.
He leaned down to whisper in her ear. ‘You’ll never guess what my horoscope is for today.’
Holly gave him a twinkling little smile. ‘You’re surely not going to read it to me now?’
He grinned at her. ‘I memorised it just for you.’
She did her best not to giggle but hardly a day went past when he didn’t make her laugh. How she loved him for that!
‘Go on, then,’ she whispered back. ‘What did it say?’
‘“Gemini: you have good stars for love and romance, perhaps a wedding or family celebration is in the air.” Not bad, huh?’
‘Guess what mine said.’
‘Go on, tell me.’
‘“Sagittarius: there are interesting stars around you at present. Could it be there is a very special announcement to be made, something to do with a pregnancy, perhaps?”’
‘Are you serious?’ His eyes grew dark with emotion.
‘You know me, darling.’ She put his hand on her still flat abdomen and smiled up at him. ‘I’m always serious.’
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5882-5
A DOCTOR BEYOND COMPARE
First North American Publication 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Melanie Milburne
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
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