A Little Bit Guilty

by Jenna Mills

  She touched him, settled her hands on his biceps slowly, tentatively, as if there were a chance the cotton of his shirt might scald her hands.

  “Gabe.” Through the reflection, her eyes met his. “It was Marcel, wasn’t it?”

  It shouldn’t have been possible for everything around him to tilt and spin like an out-of-control carnival ride, when everything inside of him just stopped.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” she said. “That’s why you can’t let this case go…why you’re so sure Marcel Lambert is guilty—your sister saw him kill your father.”

  Chapter 6

  T he answer glowed in Gabe’s eyes.

  Evangeline told herself to look away, turn away, but standing behind him, with dusk falling around them and the shadows deepening, she could no more move than she could breathe.

  It hurt to look at him. It hurt to see. But through the hazy reflection, the truth came into focus. She’d realized Gabe had an unnatural fixation on Marcel Lambert. She’d known he had a vendetta, that his desire to nail the restaurateur vibrated with an intensity that belied objectivity. At first she’d thought it was just his desire to get back in the saddle and win, to sink his teeth into something and come out on top.

  Watching his eyes, fixed on some point in the distance, she knew he did not see the skeletal cypress or the tangle of oaks, the leaves swirling with the breeze. Because it was not a man’s eyes she saw, but a boy’s…A boy whose world had shattered.

  From the very first she’d been fascinated with him, Gabe, the man, the brash young attorney working his very first case, even though he’d been leading the prosecution against her brother. There’d been a sincerity to him, a charisma that had enchanted the bright-eyed eighteen-year-old she’d been. His gaze had met hers during the opening arguments, and she would have sworn she saw a flicker of compassion, maybe even commiseration, and for a fleeting heartbeat, hope had trickled through her.

  But then the case had begun, and the ambitious Southern attorney had gotten to work. Within weeks her brother’s future had been snatched away, despite the flimsy evidence. And her mother had started to drink. To sit on the front porch and rock, insisting her baby had been framed. That Gabriel Fontenot had been unable to secure a conviction on his first case the honest way, so he’d secured it the old-fashioned way, with cold, hard Robichaud cash.

  The allegations had seemed ludicrous at first, the result of too much bourbon and sorrow. But then Evangeline’s favorite teacher had echoed the speculation, as had her best friend’s father, and she’d started to wonder.

  To hate.

  But it wasn’t hate that ripped through her now, wasn’t all those hard, destructive edges she’d used to shape her life.

  “Tell me,” she said, even though she knew it was dangerous to allow herself to see Gabe this way, to know the boy who’d lost his childhood. “Please.”

  The shadows on his face deepened. “No one believed her—not even me.”

  Somehow she kept herself from curving her arms around his middle and holding on, from laying her head against his back. But she could do nothing about the longing, the insane wish that they were two different people, in a different time and place, without a reservoir of lies and doubt festering between them.

  “It didn’t make sense,” he said in the same detached monotone witnesses used to recount something horrific. “No one even knew they were friends.”

  She didn’t let herself move, knew better than to take that last step toward him.

  “She didn’t talk for two days. The doctors said it was shock, the trauma of seeing Dad blow his brains out.”

  Evangeline closed her eyes, didn’t want to see.

  “She just sat there in that hospital bed and stared straight ahead. We took turns staying with her, my mother and my uncles, Cain and Saura and Jack—”

  “I can’t even imagine,” she whispered, and though she did not want to see, she willed her eyes to open.

  “Jack was with her when she started talking. I was coming back with coffee and I heard her scream, started to run. I found him holding her, trying to soothe her, quiet her. But she just kept screaming.”

  And Evangeline couldn’t do it any longer, couldn’t just stand there when she knew that Gabe saw it all over again—his sister in his best friend’s arms, incoherent and screaming. Not when the need to hold on sliced clear to the bone. She slid her arms around his waist and pressed closer, rested her head against his back. “I’m so sorry…”

  “She saw him.” With those words the grief of the boy hardened into the vengeance of the man. “She saw him shot dead…but no one believed her.”

  Outside, the hard rush of the wind had stopped, dropping the leaves back to the ground as fat drops of rain splattered against the ground.

  “They said it was self-inflicted, that there was no evidence of anyone else being in the room. That the horror of what Cami had seen was too great for her young mind to process, so she’d changed it, invented a shooter to take the blame off her daddy….”

  It wasn’t all that uncommon. Human nature demanded someone to blame, to punish…

  “And she just…retreated, faded almost. She was scared to sleep alone. For almost a year she’d slept with my mother or in my bottom bunk. But she never screamed again, never mentioned that night—until she saw Marcel Lambert on the news.”

  Evangeline lifted her head from his back. And in the window’s glass, their gazes met again. “What happened?”

  Gabe’s eyes were dark, shadowed. “She knew. The second she saw him, heard his voice…”

  The image formed by itself, a young girl watching television—and coming face-to-face with her father’s killer.

  “It was him,” Gabe said, and in her arms, she felt his body tense. “But there wasn’t one shred of evidence.”

  So the man had gone on to live his life, to achieve fame as a celebrated restaurateur and chef, while two children had been left to grow up without a father. “Gabe—”

  He twisted toward her, looked at her through eyes hard and dark and…tortured. But something else glittered in the cobalt, something raw and exposed, as if he’d just realized who he’d been talking to…or that he’d been talking, at all.

  And then the moment shattered and he was jerking his cell phone from his pocket and stabbing a series of numbers.

  The quick stab of rejection stunned her. Because of her brother, she told herself. She needed to get close to Gabe to find the evidence that would prove he’d secured a wrongful conviction of Jimmy. She’d already combed Gabe’s files and records at the courthouse. Now she needed access to his house—his memories.

  It would be far easier to obtain that access as his friend, his confidante, than his enemy.

  “You need to see this,” he said, without wasting time on greeting or explanation. Then he barked out directions. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, then snapped the phone shut and shoved it back into his pocket.

  “D’Ambrosia?” His cousin’s fiancé, the one who’d found Darci’s body, had been instrumental in the investigation.

  “Jack.” Without another word, he went back to the chest, squatted and continued to sift through its contents. But she stood there for a long moment afterward, hating the way he could push her away, wall her out, without so much as lifting a hand. He’d slipped, she knew. He’d told her more than he wanted to, more than he’d intended to. For a few tenuous moments, he’d looked at her the way he had before, with a warm light in his eyes.

  Quiet spilled between them as she joined him at the foot of the bed. Outside the rain came down in sheets, with no wind or lightning or thunder, just a soft patter against the windows. She wouldn’t call it a storm, only a shower, and knew that soon enough the cloudburst would pass.

  In Louisiana, they almost always did.

  But this wouldn’t, she thought, watching Gabe thumb through a stack of photographs. He’d slipped the pillowcase back around his hand, preserving evidence that was a significant blow to
the prosecution’s case against Marcel Lambert. A jury—any jury—would have a hard time believing a man could write such poetic and heartfelt words to a woman one week and strangle her to death the next.

  Except Evangeline knew juries could be persuaded through other means….

  Gabe could have destroyed it, she realized abruptly. Gabe could have boxed up every damning letter, every poem and photograph, and dumped them into the swamp, where no one would have found it.

  Instead, he’d called his childhood friend, the local sheriff.

  The realization did cruel, cruel things to the image of this man she’d carried in her heart for twelve years. “If someone wanted us to find this,” she said, “that means they know Russell Rae and Lilah don’t really exist.”

  A small wallet-sized photo in his hand, he looked up. “And that surprises you?”

  No. Not really. Marcel Lambert was an influential man. Whether or not he was guilty of murder, he was more than capable of manipulation. “Those men at the country grocery. You think—”

  Gabe’s eyes hardened, and even though he said nothing, she had her answer. And the insidious irony of it sickened—what better way to plant evidence, than to have the prosecution be the ones to find it?

  Frowning, she picked up the second pillowcase and helped him sort the letters and poems and photographs into piles. Some of them actually had dates.

  She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when Gabe’s cell phone rang. She only knew that the rain had slowed and the sky had begun to lighten. It was a simple no-nonsense ring, and Gabe had the phone in his hands and to his face within seconds.

  “Sweet mercy,” he growled, and the rough edge to his voice cut right through her. “How bad?”

  Through the distorted connection, sirens wailed. Gabe gripped the small phone and tried to hear, but could only make out random words. “Fire…” Jack shouted above the distortion, “…Pecan Street…be a while.”

  Gabe glanced at the stacks of letters and pictures, the pillowcase balled up around his hand. “Do what you need to do,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Swearing softly, he closed the phone and tossed it onto the floor, stared at a white edge protruding from the stack of photographs.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The question sliced through him. For close to thirty minutes, there’d been nothing—because before that, there’d been too damn much. He was a man of great control. He knew when to hold and when to fold, how to keep his eyes flat and his mouth even flatter. He knew how to bluff and how to lead.

  But like a goddamned fool, he’d told her about the night Camille saw Marcel Lambert murder his father.

  And he’d almost turned. When Evangeline had touched him, when she’d curved her arms around his body and rested her head against his back, he’d almost turned and put his arms around her, held her…

  Looking up, he watched her kneeling less than a foot away, her eyes dark and serious and…concerned—goddamn it—and felt the shock of discovery tighten through him like a piece of bombshell evidence that changed everything.

  And for the first time in months, he allowed himself to see her as she’d been those first few weeks, when she’d given him soft smiles and wise counsel, when she’d been there for him after they thought Alec had died, when she’d touched him and—

  When she’d touched him. Because, sweet Christ, have mercy, she had. Touched him.

  “Gabe?” Her eyes went a little wider, with a sharp edge he didn’t want to be fear, the way they had the night he’d stormed into her office and asked her to deny what his uncle had told him, that she, Evangeline, had been setting him up, to see if he would fall. “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You didn’t know me,” he said, and the words, the truth, scraped on the way out. Black-and-white, she’d said when they were in the warehouse. That’s all you see, isn’t it? All he’d ever seen.

  All that could be trusted.

  So he shoved everything else aside, all those deceptive shades of gray, and focused on what he knew to be real. “There’s a fire in Bayou d’Espere.” In an old section of town where Jack’s grandmother lived. “Jack’s going to be a while.”

  Evangeline closed the journal she’d been flipping through. “That’s odd. There wasn’t any lightning.”

  “Could have been a candle,” he said, noting again a white edge sticking out from the neat stack of photos. “Someone smoking in bed.” Or something more sinister. Odd things had been happening in Bayou d’Espere. Random break-ins, including at the historical society and city hall, but no one had found anything missing. The week before, Jack had mentioned a fire at a local storage building.

  Frowning, Gabe reached for the picture jutting out from the pile and found it stuck to the back of a picture of Marcel. He pulled it free…and found Darci smiling up at him. She looked young. Couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, he guessed. A soft light glowed in her eyes, a guilelessness he’d not seen in the other pictures. Her dress was long and soft and pink…Completely different than the more risqué outfits she’d sported in New Orleans.

  “What’s that?” Evangeline asked.

  Next to Darci stood a tall young man in a white tuxedo with a pink bow and cummerbund. His dark brown hair was a little shaggy, his cheeks ruddy. Behind them, centered beneath a balloon arch, a sign read: Congratulations Seniors!

  “A prom picture.”

  Evangeline scooted closer. “She looks so young.”

  And innocent. That’s what got him, the simplicity of the picture—hell, he had one like it stashed somewhere in his mother’s attic—a boy and girl ready to embark on life.

  “How does it happen?” Evangeline’s voice was quiet as she reached for the picture. “How does a girl go from this to a rich man’s plaything in only a couple of months?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” Gabe said. Too damn many times to count. “My first case…”

  Crouched beside him, Evangeline twisted toward him. “Your first case, what?”

  There was an odd rasp to her voice, as if she thought he was about to confess to something she did not want to hear. “Sometimes I can still see him.” Tall and lanky, his hair cut with razor precision, his big body stuffed into a suit a size too small. “He had his whole damn life ahead of him.”

  Evangeline looked up from the prom photo and pierced him with eyes a little too narrow, a lot too dark. “What happened?”

  “Quarterback of his high-school football team, shortstop on the baseball team, state title in track.” Jimmy, his name had been. “Full scholarship to Louisiana State. His girlfriend was a cheerleader…” But he’d come to New Orleans for the summer, taken a job cleaning pools in an elite neighborhood.

  Until one of his clients, the trophy wife of an investment banker, turned up strangled to death.

  “I should have lost that case,” Gabe muttered. He still did not understand how the jury had not seen even a shadow of doubt. The evidence had been circumstantial, at best.

  Evangeline’s mouth worked, but it was a moment before words formed. “What do you mean you should have lost? You didn’t think he was guilty?”

  Gabe looked down at the picture—but saw only Jimmy in handcuffs as he’d been led away. Gabe should have felt victory, triumph. “Juries are unpredictable.” The smallest piece of evidence could sway them. They were coached to reach a verdict without emotion, to study fact and not possibility. So were lawyers. The last time he’d checked up on Jimmy—

  He shoved the image, the gaunt man in the photo, from his mind. “We need a name,” he said, studying the prom photo. Darci’s date had not been interviewed by the police. If they could find him—

  “Wow,” Evangeline whispered, and then he saw what she saw, the five words scrawled on the back of the photo: I’ll love you forever.

  Frustration came hard and fast. It was a foolishly romantic vow, the kind of care
less words that got spoken too damn often—and that attorneys could twist way too easily.

  The pictures, the poems and letters, and now, Christ, a shaggy-haired boy who’d vowed to love Darci forever. Juries convicted and acquitted on a hell of a lot less.

  “Gabe—” Evangeline started, but he was already on his feet and striding across the perfectly staged little room.

  “It’s not going to work,” he vowed, stabbing his hand into the pillowcase and yanking open dresser drawers. Very little lay inside, a few changes of clothes, silk panties and a soft pink chemise, a bottle of sensuous massage oil. “This game—” he left the dresser and headed to the nightstand, ran his hand beneath the edge “—I’m not playing.”

  Evangeline came up behind him and put her hand to his, stopped his jerky movements. “Gabe—”

  He spun on her before she could say anything else. “He’s setting us up,” he snapped, and felt the hot certainty clear down to his gut. “None of this is in the police report because none of this even existed four weeks ago.” He would bet his life on it. “He brought you to me last night just like he brought us here today.” The place was probably wired, Lambert listening—or even watching. And loving every second of it. “He wants us to find this, to—”

  “Gabe.” It was the third time she’d said only his name, but this time it was soft and gentle, and when he looked at her, when he looked down at her, the devastation in her eyes rocked him. “But you called Jack, anyway,” she whispered. “You know what’s in this house could sink the case against Lambert, but you didn’t walk away, didn’t pretend you hadn’t seen anything. You cataloged every piece of information and called the sheriff….”

  The confusion in her voice scraped through him. It almost sounded as if she’d expected him to suppress the evidence.

  “What kind of man do you think I am?” he asked, but she didn’t need to say a word to answer. Her slight wince said everything. Evangeline had no idea what kind of man he was, not anymore: the assistant district attorney who made mincemeat of witnesses, or the card shark who loved to bluff. The almost-lover who’d kissed her as though he never wanted to stop.