The Night In Question

by Harper Allen

  His feelings for Anne had been different. He’d cared for her, yes, but his love for her had been composed of equal parts of compassion and worry and regret. She’d made her need for him so obvious, Max thought tiredly, and sometimes he’d wondered whether it was really him she’d needed or whether any father figure would have done. But that didn’t matter either, because in the end he’d failed her too.

  So Jules had been wrong. There were a handful of alternative reasons he could come up with as to why he was the way he was. None of them had anything to do with betraying Ethan.

  He caught himself a moment after the thought went through his mind. “For God’s sake, how could it have?” he muttered impatiently. “I never had a son, dammit. There never was an Ethan.”

  The dog at his feet made a small snuffling noise in his sleep. Max looked down at him.

  Something inside him cracked slightly.

  You hear that, buddy—I got you your very own dog, ready and waiting for you to play with…

  He frowned. He could dimly remember a man saying those very words a long time ago, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall who the man had been. It hadn’t been his grandfather, because his grandfather had never had much use for pets.

  So hurry up and get here, little guy. We’re all waiting for you…

  This time it was an actual, sharp pain. This time he thought he could hear it—a fissure widening, breaking slowly open, somewhere deep inside him. He shook his head in quick denial.

  “He never existed. I never lost a son, because he never existed.” He tried to stand, but he found he couldn’t. The pain was all-encompassing, a cold, searing sensation, as if he had come all too close to having frostbite and now was only inches from a roaring fire. He felt his heart crashing in his chest as if it were trying to burst free.

  I’m always going to be there for you, Ethan. I’m always going to keep you safe, son. I love you so much…

  Clutching the edge of the table with both hands, Max lurched to his feet, the pain so unendurable he could hardly breathe. He swayed unsteadily and nearly fell.

  “But I didn’t,” he rasped hoarsely. “I didn’t keep him safe, dammit. He was my son and I loved him and I didn’t keep him safe!”

  The pain had been unendurable before. Now it rose up in a towering wave, blotting out everything else, and he felt as if he was being torn asunder as finally—finally—the decade-old casing of ice and stone and sorrow that had surrounded the man inside him broke completely and fell away. Still holding on to the tabletop, he opened his eyes, his face wet with tears that had been waiting ten long years to fall.

  “I had a son.” He dragged in a slicing breath. “I had a son and I lost him. His name was Ethan and I loved him and I lost him.” His vision wavered and blurred. He blinked. His vision cleared.

  “And I wanted to die too,” he said unevenly. “But I didn’t, and in the end that was the hardest thing of all to accept. I love you, son. I’ve missed you so.”

  His heart rate steadied and slowed, and gradually the trembling left his limbs. Max took a deep breath and let it out, a bittersweet sense of peace stealing over him. “I’ll always keep you safe in my heart, Ethan,” he whispered softly. “You know I always will, son.”

  Feeling almost dizzily light, he started to lower himself into the chair again, his palms still braced against the table. He stopped suddenly, every muscle in his body stiffening.

  He’d let her go. He’d stood there on that sidewalk and let her go. He needed to find her, needed to tell her what a goddamn fool he’d been, needed to tell her he was completely and totally in love with her. He needed to ask her for a second chance.

  Maybe she’d already left a number where she could be reached at his office. He grabbed up the receiver from the phone on the wall, but even as he lifted it he heard it give a small ping.

  “Mr. Ross? Agent Maxwell Ross?” The voice on the other end of the line was brusquely impatient. Max pulled himself together, realizing that he’d picked up the phone just as a call had been coming in.

  “This is Max Ross, yes.” He tried to keep the impatience out of his own tone. “Who’s this?”

  “Agent Ross, it’s Gerald Beeman, the headmaster at Hartley House.” There was a touch of arrogance in the announcement. “You left a message with my secretary yesterday, asking if I could get back to you on whether or not young Willa Tennant had been enrolled in our institution. You understand, we don’t normally give out information about our students, but I called your office and they confirmed you are who you say you are.” Beeman sounded disgruntled.

  “Willa Tennant’s name was put down for Hartley at birth, Agent Ross, and when I spoke with her aunt and guardian yesterday, Ms. Van Hale assured me she would be bringing the child here today. As Ms. Van Hale attended our institution herself, I would have thought she’d realize that any tardiness in Willa’s arrival would automatically result in a black mark against her niece, and that’s certainly not the way we approve of our students starting off their years at Hartley—”

  This time it was Max who interrupted. “Ms. Van Hale told you she was bringing Willa to Hartley today? Barbara Van Hale?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Beeman’s tone was clipped. “But when she didn’t arrive here an hour ago as scheduled, I had my secretary telephone her home and I actually spoke to Ms. Van Hale myself. She was—she was quite rude.”

  For the first time in the conversation his self-possession seemed to leave him. His voice shook in remembered outrage. “She told me that as soon as Willa’s birthday party was over, she intended to take her out on a nature walk, of all things, and that no one was ever going to force her to put the child into Hartley House. Then the woman actually hung up on me.”

  Max was no longer listening. Letting the receiver drop from his suddenly nerveless fingers, he tore from the kitchen, grabbing up his keys from the hall table as he reached the front door. Behind him, Boomer scrambled to his feet with an alacrity he hadn’t displayed for years and raced after him. Even as Max opened the door and ran outside, the old dog slipped out behind him.

  “That’s been her plan all along.” Cold fear tore through him as he sprinted to the car. “She thinks she’s saving Willa—she always intended to save Willa from growing up the way she had to. The woman must be insane.”

  And that was probably the simple truth of it, he thought grimly, wrenching open the sedan’s door. With a mother like Olivia, all it would have taken was one final straw to break Barbara’s tenuous grip on sanity. That straw might well have been finding out that her husband had connived with her brother and her mother to deprive her of the children she’d always wanted so badly.

  “No, Boomer!”

  But it was too late. The dog had already jumped into the car and was sitting in the passenger seat, his tail wagging as if in apology. Max stared at him in frustration, and then got into the car himself, slamming the door closed behind him.

  “You always did like coming with me, didn’t you, old boy?” he said under his breath. “Well, brace yourself for the ride of your life, Boomer, because we’ve got a little girl to save—and we don’t have a second to waste.”

  WILLA’S SIXTH birthday party had come and gone. The mute and somehow forlorn evidence of the festivities had been strewn all over the lawn in the sprawling half acre or so of Barbara’s backyard. Julia had left the Mercedes running in the drive outside the house and had run around to the rear of the rambling and old-fashioned home when her frantic pounding on the door hadn’t been answered. She’d stared at the balloons tied to the backs of child-size chairs, at the crumbled remains of a chocolate cake sitting in the middle of the pretty mauve cloth covering the long trestle table, at the party-favor gold clip-on tiara lying discarded beside a plate of melting ice cream.

  Despair had washed over her, and she’d closed her eyes, trying frantically to figure out where Barbara would have taken Willa.

  Then she’d remembered the little clearing by t
he cliffs. Instantly she’d known with icy certainty that her daughter was there.

  It wasn’t a hunch, Julia told herself desperately as the Mercedes’s suspension crashed over a pothole in the rutted road she and Max had driven only a few days ago. Hunches could be wrong, so she wouldn’t allow herself to think of it as a hunch. It hadn’t been a hunch when she’d known earlier that Willa was in danger, and it wasn’t one now. It was as if there was a finely-woven silver cord stretching between her daughter and herself, a cord that had been there since the physical one between them had been removed at the little girl’s birth, and she was so acutely attuned to Willa that even the slightest disturbance in her daughter’s life ran down that cord to alert her.

  Max wouldn’t think that was crazy, Julia told herself. Max would think that was perfectly reasonable.

  He’d been about to ask her not to go, she thought in anguish. But in the end he hadn’t been able to say the words that would have meant he’d finally come to terms with his past and the child he swore he’d never had.

  She’d had her daughter taken away from her. He’d lost a son. Maybe that had been why they’d understood each other’s pain so well.

  And maybe that was also how she knew what Barbara was planning to do, she thought. The children Babs had dreamed of having had been taken from her just as brutally, and in her own unbalanced way she was trying to ensure that she never lost another child again.

  But she is unbalanced. Julia’s mouth firmed implacably. And it’s my daughter she’s planning to take with her. Whatever it takes to stop her, I’ll do it.

  The small parking area came suddenly into view. Almost unable to see past the roiling dust cloud that had flown up around her vehicle, she wrenched the wheel hard over and turned into the lot.

  As the dust dissipated she saw she’d narrowly missed hitting the only other car parked there. Barely waiting for the Mercedes to rock to a stop, she jumped out and ran over to the small blue sedan.

  On the back seat was a teddy bear. It wore a patchworked jacket. Its boot-button eyes stared blankly up at her, and she felt her blood turn to ice.

  A moment later she was sprinting.

  Twenty minutes into her run Julia found herself having to stop and wipe away the blood that was trickling down from a cut above her eye and obscuring her vision. She caught her breath and plunged on, almost immediately stepping on a loose rock and twisting her ankle painfully, but she didn’t allow herself to break stride.

  She shot around one last corner and skidded to a halt, her heart in her mouth.

  Since the near-tragedy only a few days ago, the railing at the edge of the cliff had obviously been repaired and strengthened. Just as obviously, Barbara had spent some considerable time and effort in tearing it down again. She had what looked like a tire iron in her hand. She whirled around and met Julia’s frozen stare.

  “You.” Her voice was dull. “I didn’t expect you, Julia. But it doesn’t matter anyway—you’re too late.”

  Very slowly, Julia allowed her gaze to travel downward, to the huddled shape of the child at Barbara’s moccasin-shod feet. Her heart beat slower and slower, until finally it hardly seemed to pump at all.

  Willa stirred slightly. One curled fist crept up to her mouth. Julia felt hope jolt through her like an electric shock.

  “She’s alive!” she said tremulously. She took a quick step forward. “Dear God, Babs—I thought you’d—”

  “Stay where you are, Julia.” Barbara’s voice cut through the silence of the little clearing like a whip-crack. She bent down and grasped Willa’s limp wrist as Julia halted. “One more step and you’ll see your daughter die. We’ll both be over that cliff before you can stop me.”

  “But Babs, why?” Her question came out in an agonized whisper. “You don’t have to do this! I know you want to save her from what you went through, but this isn’t the way! You love her—how can you even think of ending her life like this?”

  “That’s right, Julia. I love her.” Again there was a hopeless note in Barbara’s soft voice. “I love her more than anyone possibly could, but Olivia’s stronger than me—strong and ruthless. Even you never could stand up to her, could you?”

  The brown eyes filled with tears. The slim shoulders shook. Julia took a cautious step closer.

  “I made a lot of mistakes when I was married to Kenneth,” she said evenly. “But I wouldn’t have allowed Olivia to take over Willa’s upbring—”

  “I couldn’t take that chance!” Barbara’s eyes blazed furiously at her. “I knew about the agreement you’d signed, and all I could see was another human being—a child—about to be destroyed by my monster of a mother. She did it to me. She did it to Noel and to Kenneth. Dear God—she made sure my husband couldn’t give me any children, Julia! Did you know that?”

  “I knew that. And you’re right, she is a wicked woman.” Barbara’s face was contorted in a rictus of pain, and Julia edged forward a few more steps. “You planted that bomb, didn’t you, Babs? You planted that bomb, and you made sure all the evidence pointed at me.”

  “I found out about Robert’s operation. I wasn’t in love with him, but I’d thought he would make a good father—and I knew I would be a good mother. I wanted that more than anything in the world.” Her voice wavered, and then hardened. “But when I found out what he’d done, and that Olivia and Kenneth had made it a condition of his marrying into Tenn-Chem, I decided to destroy them the way they’d destroyed me. So I blew up that plane with my husband and my brother on it, and I made sure that you went to prison for it by leaving the evidence at the Cape Ann house. That meant that I got Willa—and that meant that Olivia was robbed of any chance of influencing her only grandchild.”

  She straightened and threw her shoulders back, letting go of Willa’s wrist. Her chin lifted. “It was worth it,” she said simply. “These last few years have been heaven. I kept her safe from all harm right up until the end, Julia.”

  “I know you did, Babs.” Julia kept her voice soft and non-threatening. “I know you would have given your own life for her. And that’s why I can’t believe you’d harm her now.”

  “I haven’t harmed her.” Barbara shook her head and gazed lovingly down at the child at her feet. “We had a wonderful time today, and then she fell asleep. I gave her something in her milk, like I did before,” she added softly. “Nothing dangerous, just a mild sedative. I didn’t want her to be afraid.”

  Barbara still looked like the shy, sweet-natured sister-in-law she’d once known, Julia told herself shakily. But that woman had gone forever. The Barbara standing in front of her was totally insane, and no amount of reasoning would reach her.

  Even as the thought went through her mind she saw something shift behind Barbara’s gaze. The slim shoulders bent swiftly. The delicate-looking hand reached down to grab Willa.

  “Stay away from my daughter!”

  Covering the space between them in a leap, furiously Julia threw herself at Barbara, almost knocking the other woman off her feet and pushing her several yards past Willa’s huddled body.

  “She’s my daughter—and I won’t let you have her!” she gasped as Babs, with surprising strength, grappled with her. Julia felt a numbing pain glance off her shoulder, and looked up just in time to avoid the tire iron as Barbara one-handedly brought it swinging down at her head. With a mighty effort, she rammed the other woman a few feet farther back along the path, and then she saw Babs’s eyes widen.

  Still gripping Barbara by the shoulders, Julia turned, half suspecting a trick. A wave of cold dread washed over her. Even as she released her grip and started to run she felt Barbara’s hand grab at her, holding her back.

  Willa, groggy and dizzy, but on her feet, was only a foot or so from the edge of the cliff and tottering closer to it with each unsteady step. She didn’t even look up as Julia screamed out her name.

  “Willa! Willa, no!”

  “It’s better this way.” Barbara’s hoarse whisper was cracked and broken. “Let her
go, Julia. This is the best way.”

  “For God’s sake, let me save her!” Julia struggled frantically to get away, but even as she did she felt the tire iron smash down on her wrist. Barbara raised it again, her face an unrecognizable mask of madness. Julia twisted around, her eyes fixed desperately on the tiny figure at the edge of the cliff.

  From the trees at the edge of the clearing burst a compact black shape, moving so fast it was almost a blur. It raced at top speed toward the little girl swaying on the edge of the cliff, and launched itself like a missile at the child.

  The heavy black body crashed into Willa, knocking her backward and away from the crumbling drop. The dog—it was a dog, Julia saw now—took a few more stumbling steps and then dropped like a stone on the dirt path.

  “Boomer!” It was Boomer, Julia thought in shock. But how—

  “Julia!” Max tore into the clearing, and even as he raced toward her she saw him take in the small body still lying only feet away from the cliff. Bending down at a run, he scooped Willa up in his arms and sprinted toward the line of sheltering pine trees behind the picnic table. Gently he deposited his small burden on the ground, safely away from the dangerous cliff edge, and then he turned back.

  “She was mine! She was supposed to be mine forever!” Barbara’s words were ragged with shock and hatred. “If I can’t have her, then you can’t either!”

  Gripping Julia’s throbbing wrist with insanely superhuman strength, she darted back to the break in the fence. Julia saw Max’s eyes darken in horror, saw him racing toward her, saw the desperation in his face as he reached out for her.

  She felt the earth beneath her feet shift. In front of her, Babs stepped off the cliff into thin air.

  And Julia felt herself falling with her.

  “Jules!”

  Max’s hand shot out as she lost her balance, and as he grabbed her, Julia felt Barbara’s grasp on her loosen and slip. In shock, she saw the slim body fall past the jagged edges of granite and land brokenly on the rocks far below.