by Justine Davis, Amy J. Fetzer, Katherine Garbera, Meredith Fletcher, Catherine Mann
And again she liked him for saying that. It would have been easy for him to have come to hate everyone associated with that time. That he didn’t, or wouldn’t let himself, said a lot about him. It seemed there was much to admire about him besides the looks that made her pulse kick into overdrive.
His words also told her he was more rational about it all than perhaps she would have liked. If he wasn’t a crazed obsessive, then there was more likely some foundation to his story and he couldn’t be dismissed outright. Nor could his suspicions about Athena.
“So you went back?” she asked.
“I had no choice. I wanted to run away, because I knew if I stayed they’d be watching me like a hawk. There’d be no way I could go to follow up any clues. I thought if I could get away I could use the money they’d paid her for having the baby to find them.”
“That seems rather fitting.”
“I thought so. But I knew if I ran away and then tried to access the money myself they’d find me, catch me and take me back or throw me in juvie. I was between the proverbial rock and a hard place.”
“What did you do?”
“First, I tried to hire a private investigator.”
She blinked. “You did?”
The idea of that determined fifteen-year-old boy walking into some private investigator’s office floored her. At fifteen, getting through her courses at Athena had been her biggest problem. And if she’d had any trouble, she had her grandfather to turn to. Justin had had no one. She felt another tug of that growing admiration and began to wonder just how much trouble she was in.
“For a while, anyway,” he said. “But I couldn’t find a P.I. who’d take me seriously, either. Finally I went back to the nicest one and asked if he would at least make some phone calls for me. I told him all I needed was an adult to ask the questions, and I’d pay him as if he were out doing real P.I. work.”
“And he did it?”
“Finally. That’s how I found out Betsy Stone, his part-time nurse, also worked at Athena. And that all the hospital records showed that Kelly and her baby had died from complications during the birth.” He let out a long, compressed breath. “The P.I. said Dr. Reagan had a small, exclusive practice, and there was no breath of scandal attached to him. No one had anything negative to say.” He paused. “I looked into Reagan myself, once I finished FBI training and was assigned to Arizona. Dr. Reagan had died a few years back from heart failure.”
Alex stopped rubbing at her goose bump-covered skin. “Do you have a first name?”
“Yes. It was Henry. Dr. Henry Reagan. Why?”
“Nothing,” Alex said, “just trying to keep everything straight.”
But inside she was shaken. Very shaken. Although he likely didn’t know it, Justin had just added a solid and very heavy block of credibility to what had seemed to be far-out and very unlikely speculation. But no longer could he be written off as simply an obsessed man driven by some childhood conspiracy theory. Nor could she deny that his sister’s death and Rainy’s were somehow connected.
Because Dr. Henry Reagan had been the name on the medical charts about Rainy’s appendectomy.
“I’ve kept track of Athena Academy for years, hoping for a clue. I knew who Lorraine Carrington was. When I read about her death, I checked into it,” he said.
“Rainy,” Alex said. “Call her Rainy. She hated being called Lorraine.”
“Oh.”
He seemed disconcerted by that, as if knowing her nickname made her more than just a name in a newspaper.
“And you?” he asked. “Are you Alex instead of Alexandra?”
She eyed him warningly. “For those I’m on a first-name basis with, yes.”
“Okay, Ms. Forsythe,” he said with a wry smile. “I saw you on television. That obnoxious bimbette of a reporter who cornered you all at the funeral.”
Okay, points for that, Alex thought. Most men just saw the good-looking blonde part.
But she hadn’t realized Shannon had actually put anything on the air. “She actually ran some of that tape? What could she possibly have used? We all creamed her, and surely she wouldn’t put Tory’s face on the air, when they’re in such hot competition on rival networks.”
“No,” Justin said, “she got around that by just showing all of you on film and voicing over it herself. The only real sound bite she used was from you.”
“Me?” That startled her.
“You don’t seem the type who’s hungry for notoriety, or to get her face on television.”
Alex blinked. “What?”
“She played a clip where you asked—too disingenuously if you ask me—if you were really going to be on the news. Her voice-over implied that you were eager to be on TV, because most Athena graduates were upset that they weren’t as famous as they had expected to be. Not in so many words, but the inference was definitely there.”
Alex smothered a disgusted groan.
“I assume she edited you?” he asked.
Alex grimaced. “Oh, not much, only the part where I pointed out she’s the only person ever to be kicked out of Athena, for incompetence, lying, stealing and trying to frame someone else for it.”
His brows rose. “Really?” He looked thoughtful. “I didn’t know she’d ever been a student at Athena at all. So, then, the subtext she was trying to plant must be that you’re all jealous of her, because she’s got face time on the little screen and you don’t?”
Okay, more points for picking up on that so quickly, Alex thought. He was piling them up at a rapid rate.
“Probably,” she muttered.
“Now isn’t that just too interesting.”
“What’s interesting to me,” Alex said, “is how she found out about the funeral at all. It wasn’t announced or advertised.”
As soon as she said the words, all the points she’d been mentally tallying for him suddenly weren’t worth as much, and she asked him the question she now realized she should have thought of long ago.
“Which brings me to how you found out about it, in time to show up.”
“Simple,” he said. “I called the Pinal County sheriff, where the accident occurred. They knew.”
“So you badged it out of them?”
“I hardly had to push. They had no reason not to cooperate,” he said mildly.
“Of course not,” she said dryly. Then another thought occurred to her, and her gaze narrowed as she looked at him. “What about the morgue?”
He blinked. “What?”
“The morgue. What were you doing there?” Her voice rose a fraction as the memory of that hand reaching for Rainy’s body came back to her with the force of a blow. “What were you doing to Rainy?”
He frowned then. “I didn’t do anything. I was never at the morgue, or even at the hospital. I thought it would call too much attention to my poking around on this. I’m already skating a fine line.”
She stared at him for a long, silent moment, trying to decide if she believed him or not. She wanted to, and that scared her a little, given the effect he had on her.
“I won’t say I didn’t think about it,” he admitted. “But I figured I’d just get a copy of the autopsy when it was filed, and that would be one less place I’d have to stick my nose into.”
“Especially since you’re not supposed to be sticking your nose in anywhere near this case.” She didn’t miss the faint grimace that tightened his mouth. “So how much trouble are you in?”
“Some,” he said with a half shrug. “But not a lot. Not yet, anyway,” he amended wryly. “Although you didn’t help any, with that stunt yesterday.”
“At the time, I thought you had it coming.”
“And now?”
“Now, I haven’t decided yet.”
So, she thought, if he hadn’t been the one in the morgue, then there was no way—or should be no way—he could know about the egg mining. And if he didn’t know about the egg mining, then there was one more obvious question.
She asked it.
“What makes you think Rainy’s death has anything to do with what happened to your sister?”
“I don’t know if it does. I just know that anything suspicious having to do with Athena or anyone from Athena was something I wanted to check out. And then I heard the rumor that you and the others suspected it was murder—”
“Where did you hear that?” she asked sharply.
“Well, I didn’t hear that in so many words, exactly,” he said. “I heard from the locals that you were…having trouble accepting that it was an accident, I think was how they put it. And then when the reporter said you thought it was murder, I put it together.”
“I’d like to know where the bimbette heard it,” Alex muttered.
A trace of a smile flickered across his face before he continued. “Anyway, the more I dug, the stranger the whole thing got. And when I found out your friend had been going to a fertility specialist that occasionally recommended surrogates….”
He ended with a shrug, and Alex felt a little burst of relief. He really didn’t know about the egg mining. Assuming, of course, that he was telling the truth. But he’d been honest so far, at least as far as she knew. And while what he’d told her was hardly the basis for a rational investigation, she supposed it was enough for a man obsessed.
“So that’s why you were poking around in Dr. Halburg’s files?”
“That’s why I went there. But like I said, the office was already a wreck when I got there today.”
“So why were you at Athena?”
“Which time?” he asked.
She felt a drip of moisture from her glass run over her finger as another piece fell into place. “It was you, wasn’t it? The other night at Athena?”
“You mean when you rode off into the mountains and were gone until daylight?” he asked sourly. “Yeah, that was me. All I wanted to do was talk to you.”
“Why didn’t you simply say so, then?”
“I knew that the fewer people who saw me on Athena grounds, the better. I didn’t want to get caught there again, and be facing harassment charges or something. And you weren’t alone that night in the barn.”
Alex stifled a grin. “But I was.”
“You were what?”
“Alone.”
“Well, after the other woman left, yeah, and I started toward the barn, but by then you were coming out on that horse and I couldn’t catch you on foot. So I—”
“There was no other woman.”
“—watched and waited, until…. What did you say?”
“There was no other woman.”
“I mean the woman who came out of the barn right after you went in and—” He stopped himself abruptly. He stared at her. “That was you? With the drawl? But she was smaller, shorter and—”
At her nod, his expression went from disbelief to sheepishness, followed by a slow shake of his head and the most rueful chuckle she’d ever heard.
“Damn,” he said, “you’re good.”
“Okay, you get your points back,” she said, and even when he looked at her quizzically she didn’t explain. She didn’t think she could, not without betraying more than she was ready to about how she was coming to feel about Agent Justin Cohen.
She drank the last of her tea with lemonade. She stirred up the ice that remained in the plastic cup. He’d already drained his frappuccino a few minutes ago. They sat in silence for a long time before he spoke again, and when he did his voice was quiet, almost gentle.
“From what little I’ve been able to find out since Kelly died and I’ve been focused on Athena, I’ve learned that it’s a very special place.”
“It’s more than that,” Alex said, responding to his tone. “It’s a way of life, a goal, an achievement, a touchstone and…home.”
She’d not often put it into words like that, and that she’d done it now, to a virtual stranger, surprised her. She was used to not talking about it to anyone on the outside at all, so this seemed doubly odd. But also necessary; perhaps if he understood, he would realize what he might be damaging with his relentless crusade.
As if he’d read her thoughts, he said, “I don’t mean any harm to that. But I’m going to find out what really happened to my sister. I wish that it wasn’t all tangled up with Athena, but I’m certain that it is.”
Alex wished she could deny it, so vehemently and positively that he would be forced to believe it, forced to go away and leave them alone.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t deny it at all, not with the knowledge she had about what had been done to Rainy. Athena, or someone there, could very well have been involved, just as Kayla had suspected.
And that tore at the very foundation of her life.
Just like his sister’s death had destroyed the foundation of Justin’s life?
The thought rose unbidden in her mind, tugging at the heart of the girl who’d once woven midnight fantasies about a darkly passionate young man.
And she told herself she’d better remember that there were two sides to all this.
And both sides had already lost a great deal.
Chapter 17
Alex felt numb. She went through the motions, got back into her car, slipped off her jacket and put her weapon back into the satchel holster, got in, started the engine, put it in gear, released the brake, exited the parking garage, negotiated the streets of Tucson, got on the right road to get to I-10 and back to Phoenix.
But she did it mechanically, feeling little, not even the heat. If she hadn’t left it on when she’d turned off the car, she doubted she would be able to think clearly enough to turn on the air-conditioning.
She tried to think of a time, any time, when she’d felt this way. There was none. The closest she could come up with was when she was nine and they had feared G.C. was having a heart attack. The thought of losing him had been devastating, and the first real trauma of her sheltered life. She’d never really known her father, had seen little of him since he’d never been close to her or her brother, and his passing years ago had made barely a ripple in her life. The only thing she’d learned from it was that death was indeed final and forever, but since she’d never had to apply it to someone she really, truly loved, the lesson lay dormant, waiting.
But G.C. was something else, he was the cornerstone, the core around which all else had revolved in her child’s world. She hadn’t even had Athena then, not yet, so her grandfather was also the only center her life had had. As a child she had lived for the weekends and summers she and Ben spent with him, and only much later had she realized what he must have had to do, arranging his busy and complex business life, to be able to spend that much time with his grandchildren. And how he must have been trying to make up for the absence of his son, their father, in all of their lives.
The thought of losing her grandfather had terrified her beyond dealing with, and she had gone into complete, total denial, refusing to admit even to herself that it was happening at all. She had hidden from it, immersing herself in reading, music, television, even sneaking out of the house at night, wanting the intense concentration it took to get out unheard, anything that would help her pretend that grim reality wasn’t out there, hovering.
But it had turned out to be something benign, she couldn’t even remember now what, and her life had quickly settled back into its pleasant course as she pretended it had all been a bad dream or a mistake.
When the time came, after her brief rebellion, she went to Athena, and it gave her what had always been missing in any relationship outside of hers with her grandfather and sometimes her brother, a sense of tightly knit family, of people you could count on no matter what, of the kind of bonds built by choice rather than by familial ties.
Now that was being threatened. Athena was the place where she’d grown up, the place that had provided her the stability and structure she needed. It was the place her grandfather had helped fund and build, it was the kind of home she’d never had with her mother, the place closest to her heart outside of
the farm.
It was everything she’d told Justin it was, and more.
And she was too old now to go into denial. Rainy was dead, and the answers to why were tied somehow toAthena. She would have to deal with it, not just hide out in her room and hope that it all went away. But she was honest enough with herself to admit that that was exactly what she wanted to do.
The only way that would be possible would be if she refused to believe anything Justin had told her. And while she still didn’t trust him—he’d gone about this whole thing too crazily, and she was wary of anyone with an obsession, especially one that had lasted nearly twenty years. While she wasn’t one hundred percent convinced everything he’d told her was the truth, she couldn’t dismiss everything he’d said out of hand. If for no other reason than that single name of Doctor Henry Reagan.
Images unwound in her mind, images that could have been from a childhood dream come true. Sitting across a table from the Dark Angel, his attention focused completely on her as he poured out the story of his life. How many times had she—and countless others at Athena, no doubt—fantasized about just such an event? Dreamed of being the one, the only, that the Dark Angel trusted enough to tell the truth to? Of what it would feel like to be that chosen one?
But like so many childhood dreams that one day came true, this one had become real long after she’d stopped caring about it.
Oh, now there’s some denial, that little voice in her head cried.
Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
Admit it, she told herself with the first spark of real feeling that had burned its way through the numbing chill, you don’t trust him because you don’t want to. Because then you have to face the effect he has on you. And the fact that you already feel more connected to him than to the man you’re supposed to marry.
Once the burst of emotion had passed she was able to look at it more rationally, to realize that her undeniable attraction to him was only part of it. That she had more solid reasons not to take on faith everything Justin had told her, not the least of which was that people with obsessions rarely saw things regarding that obsession clearly. And since his had started so young, who knew what false assumptions he had made along the way that had brought him to the conclusions he’d reached?
