Lancelot of the Pines (Louisiana Knights Book 1)

by Jennifer Blake

  “Not here,” Lance said in a low growl. “The conference room.”

  The two men stood glaring at each other. Then Sheriff Tate moved on. Unlocking a solid door at the end of the hall, he threw it open, strode inside, and then stood back while Mandy and Lance entered.

  The conference room was long and narrow, with a bank of windows on one side that overlooked the town square, a coffee setup in one corner, and a long table of polished wood in the center. Mandy was waved into a seat on one side of the table, while the sheriff moved toward the head of it.

  “Lose the handcuffs.” Lance’s voice was unrelenting as he pulled out a chair across from Mandy.

  The sheriff rolled his eyes, but complied.

  With the cuffs gone, Mandy sat rubbing her wrists. Lance met her gaze over the width of the table. “You have the right to a lawyer.”

  It might be a wise move, but she shook her head. To wait for a lawyer to come and sit beside her seemed intolerable when she couldn’t imagine she would actually be held on the charge against her. However, watching the sheriff hunt around in a cabinet next to the coffee machine and then bring out a small tape recorder almost changed her mind.

  He spoke into the recorder with the date, time and identities of all present, set it on the table between them, and then settled back into his chair. “Okay, Mrs. Caret, let’s start at the beginning. When did you first meet the deceased?”

  It was difficult to force words through the tightness in her throat, but she managed it on the third try. “Almost nine years ago now. He was in court, representing someone else, the day I was arraigned on shoplifting charges. When the judge asked if I had a lawyer, I had to say no. Bruce stood up and offered to take my case.”

  “Good of him, I’d say.”

  It was hard to look past the sarcasm in that comment or the fact that she’d been through this with Lance already, though Mandy tried. “He did that, sometimes, if a case interested him.”

  “And yours did.”

  She gave him her best emotionless stare. “So it seems.”

  “So you had a criminal record when the two of you got married.”

  “Tate,” Lance said, a note of warning in his voice.

  The sheriff turned his gimlet gaze across the table. “I’m establishing proven facts.”

  “Doesn’t sound that way to me.”

  The lawman snorted before turning back to Mandy. “Caret didn’t try to get you off on the shoplifting charge.”

  “It was a first offense with mitigating circumstances. He thought I’d get no more than probation if I entered a guilty plea.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Why was that?”

  “The testimony of the guy who caught me. He said I’d taken a necklace with a diamond chip, along with the other things, but I hadn’t.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “So the cost of what I’d picked up would total more than five hundred dollars. He told me nobody would believe I hadn’t taken the necklace, and it would mean the difference between a sentence of six months or five years.”

  “You make it sound as if he had it in for you.”

  “He did.”

  “So he threatened you when he stopped you from going out the door with stolen goods.”

  She gave a quick shake of her head. “It was in his office while we waited for the police.”

  “Where, according to the record, you caused him grievous injury and permanent bodily harm.”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “But you did something to him?”

  “What would you do if some creep tried—” She stopped, closed her lips tightly across her teeth.

  “Tried to what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Lance spoke then, though he looked at the wall above her head. “Tell him, Mandy.”

  “Tell me what?” Sheriff Tate divided a glance between the two of them.

  Lance already knew the details. That should have made it easier, but didn’t. “The guy said he wouldn’t call the police if I was nice to him. Preferably, on my knees. When I refused, he tried to force me. I bit him.”

  “You bit him.”

  “It seemed logical, considering where he was holding my head.”

  “Grievous bodily harm. I see.” The sheriff put a hand to his mouth, rubbed down his chin before he went on. “So you have a history of violence.”

  She closed her eyes. “Not a history. It was that once.”

  He grunted at that. “So tell me about these mitigating circumstances.”

  Mandy glanced at Lance and then away again. She didn’t want to talk about it, couldn’t stand to talk about it. It cut too deep, allowing the pain of guilt to well up inside until her heart ached with it. And yet, what choice did she have?

  “The things I stole weren’t for me.”

  “Sure they weren’t. Let’s see if I can remember from the report. Besides a box of Twinkies and couple of bags of chips, I think it was a bottle of perfume and maybe a hoodie. Besides the necklace, of course. That sound about right?”

  She shrugged. What could she say? It was true, after all.

  “Doesn’t sound like stuff for anybody else to me.”

  “They were for Clare, my sister. She was in a mental institution.”

  Lance sat back in his chair, bracing his hands on the edge of the table, as he stared at her. She’d never told him that last part, she knew; it was too private, too hurtful.

  “Touching,” the sheriff said. “And how did you intend to pass them along to her?”

  “I had a way.” She stared at the reflection in the window glass with the dark night behind it as she recited the dry yet horrific events. The way her mother had been taken away by the police, the scary business of Family Services removing her and Clare from their apartment, then the news of their mother’s death and being separated from her sister.

  “She was younger than you, this sister?”

  The question was strictly for the facts; there was scant sympathy in it. Mandy answered it with the dry truth.

  “She was six and I was ten. I’d always taken care of her when our mom was working. She was—was what’s called a special needs child, had Asperger’s Syndrome. I was the only one she would ever speak to, and then it was in a whisper now and then. Without me, she had no one. She was terrified of strangers, and all at once everyone she knew was going to be a stranger. I tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. They said she needed to be institutionalized. When I cried and screamed, I was sedated. For weeks.”

  The room was quiet. Mandy could feel Lance’s gaze on her face, but she couldn’t look at him. She didn’t want or need his pity, but if he had none for her, she didn’t want to know it that either.

  “That was when you were ten. You were fourteen when you were turned over to juvenile justice.”

  She shook back her hair while wishing she had her clasp to hold it in place. “Yes, well, it was also after several different sets of foster parents and a few times of running away and being brought back. The last time I ran away, I was barely fourteen but looked older, so it wasn’t as easy to find me.”

  “Which still leaves several months unaccounted for.”

  “I lived on the street, part of a group of kids who knew the score and had good places to hide. Some of them had electronics and were good at hacking into the state databases. They found Clare in an institution for the mentally ill. She’d become little more than a zombie.”

  “You found out how she was doing, as well as where she was, did you?”

  The look she gave the sheriff was blank. She could almost feel herself falling back into the unresponsive state she’d perfected as a teenager. It put mental distance between her and authority so it became unnecessary to feel. When she spoke her voice was a dull monotone.

  “There are ways to get into almost any public database or public building if you have the nerve to use them. I saw Clare a few times after I locat
ed her. It took a while to break through to her, actually be sure she knew me. I told her how to avoid taking the medication they were giving her to make her so spaced out. She was getting a little better, might have been able to walk out of that place with me eventually if I’d had more time.”

  “But you were arrested instead.”

  She inclined her head. “I don’t know what she thought when I didn’t come again, don’t know how she acted or what they did to her, but by the time I was able to see her again, she was worse than she’d been before.”

  “Which was?”

  “After my time was reduced for good behavior and I was released. After Bruce said he’d take care of me and do everything he could to get Clare out of that place if I—if I would marry him.”

  “You’re telling me you married him for your sister, not for his money?”

  “I married him because he was a power in the legal community and had the status and wealth that brings, wealth he was willing to use to help Clare.”

  “Sounds like the same thing to me.”

  It wasn’t, but how to explain it to someone who didn’t want to understand? “Fine. I married him for his money.”

  The sheriff looked at Lance. “Which makes you a common gold-digger, doesn’t it.”

  Lance’s features were set in brooding lines, and his crossed arms folded over his chest. Mandy remembered then that his ex-wife and been a money-hungry female who qualified in spades for the title she’d been given. It increased the hollow sensation in her chest, made her want to cry out that she wasn’t like that, had never been like that.

  But was it true? Would she have agreed to marry Bruce if he’d had no money, no power in the legal system that might have helped her free Clare?

  No, she wouldn’t have. And what did that make her?

  Maybe she was a gold-digger, after all.

  The bleakness inside her grew, forcing tears into the back of her throat, making her eyes burn. She swallowed with a convulsive effort, unwilling to look weak and defenseless.

  “So what happened? How come your sister wasn’t living with you when Caret disappeared?”

  “She died.”

  “Just like that?” The question came from Lance.

  “The death certificate said pneumonia. It seemed to me it was more loss of hope or someone to care.”

  “But you cared.”

  “Enough touchy-feely,” the sheriff said before she could answer. “What I want to know is how come you didn’t go get her.”

  “I would have if I could,” Mandy said with tears in her voice. “But the guardianship arrangement she was under had to be changed before Bruce and I could establish legal custody. She had to be certified fit to leave the institution she was in, fit to live among other people and not be a danger to them or to herself. It was a legal process that went on and on and—and finally took too long.”

  “Meanwhile, you were enjoying the high life as Caret’s wife.”

  A short laugh left her. “You might call it that. I wouldn’t.”

  “You had a big house, fancy clothes, a fine car, right? Yeah, I’d call it that.”

  “You didn’t have to live with Bruce.”

  “You saying it was no bed of roses?”

  She closed her eyes, shutting out his hard, accusing face. “Not always.”

  “What? Not enough diamonds, vacations or thousand dollar shoes?”

  “I was a possession, and Bruce made sure I knew it.”

  “But now you’re not. He’s gone, killed by a person or persons unknown who seem to want you dead, too. Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You lived with the man for what—three years or more, and you don’t know what was going on with him?”

  “He didn’t talk about business with me. If I asked questions, he said he preferred to leave all that at the office.”

  “Convenient. For you, that is, the little trophy wife who saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing, so can’t guess what happened to him.”

  “It’s the way he was, the way things were.”

  “When was the last time you saw your husband?”

  She’d heard that question so many times before she could answer it by rote. “We had dinner the night before he disappeared.”

  “He didn’t act different, say anything different?”

  “He didn’t like the carrots in honey and butter sauce.”

  The sheriff grunted. “Very informative. And you didn’t see him before he left the house the next morning.”

  “He wasn’t a morning person, didn’t eat breakfast or like to talk while he had his coffee. He always went in to work early so he could get things done before people started arriving or clients began to call. So no, I never saw him at that time of day.”

  “As far as you know, he went to work as usual.”

  “The housekeeper said he did when I began to be concerned and asked her about it. I believe she told the police the same thing.”

  “And he didn’t come home, yet you never reported him missing.”

  “He sometimes worked late, spent the night at his office and then stayed over next day. It was evening again before I realized he hadn’t done that. I began to call his law partners and coworkers on the following morning. But then the police came to tell me his car had been found, and he—he wasn’t in it.”

  “I suppose you’ve no idea why anyone would want him dead.”

  She shook her head.

  “Or why they’ve turned their attention to you now? Or how it is they keep turning up wherever you are?”

  She met the questions with an empty stare.

  “She’s told you she doesn’t know,” Lance said. “Let it go.”

  The sheriff gave him a hard look. “Well, I suggest she figure it out and fast, or she’s going to be in court again, and this time it will be for murder.”

  “I don’t know, I swear it,” Mandy put in then. “Bruce was a secretive man, always working some kind of angle. I never knew the details of what he was doing, even where I was concerned. There were a few times after Clare died when I thought—” She came to a halt as she saw where what she had been about to say might lead.

  “Thought what? Let’s hear it.”

  She swallowed, moistened dry lips with the tip of her tongue then tried again. “I thought he had what he wanted, after our marriage I mean, and didn’t want it to change. I suspected he never used his influence to see Clare was released because he didn’t want to—to share the life we had, not even with my sister.”

  Lance exclaimed under his breath, a sound that might have meant something or nothing at all.

  “You thought that, did you?” the sheriff demanded. “And wouldn’t it be natural to hate him for that negligence after your sister passed?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Hate him enough to kill him?”

  “No, I’d never—”

  “Sounds like a motive for murder to me,” the sheriff said with grim satisfaction. Reaching out, he turned off the tape recorder.

  Chapter 17

  Lance left her. He didn’t say a word to her, didn’t make his excuses to Sheriff Tate, but simply stood up and walked out of the conference room.

  Mandy thought at first he might have gone to call a lawyer to represent her, after all, and would return in a few minutes. It didn’t happen. She was alone while being booked on the murder charge, alone when she was locked into a holding cell.

  No other prisoners were present. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking this any special consideration; it seemed more an indicator of a slow night in Chamelot.

  The cell would have pleased a minimalist. The floor was gray and so were the bars. Two of its white walls were stacked with bunks fitted with grayish white sheets without pillows, while the usual facilities were concealed behind a low screen in one corner. That was it.

  Mandy sat down on one of the bunks. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, bracing her hands on either side of
her knees.

  Murder. She was charged with murder. They thought she had paid to have Bruce killed. Even Lance must believe it, though he’d thought she was innocent for a while. Why else would he have walked out and left her to whatever was coming to her?

  She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the emptiness inside her, denying the pain of it. She wouldn’t cry, she wouldn’t. If he could think such a thing of her, he wasn’t worth crying over.

  She had expected better of him. Against all odds and in defiance of what she had learned of the way things went in her world, she had trusted him to be there for her.

  She had trusted Deputy Lance Benedict despite refusing to put faith in anyone or anything since she was a child. She’d thought he cared for her in some small way. She’d even dared think it might grow into something more. How wrong could she have been?

  And what did that make her, except a needy child instead of a woman, one always yearning after the love and home lost to her years ago?

  Her mother had loved her and Clare, in spite of everything. It hadn’t been her fault that she couldn’t cope with life the way it had turned out for her. Some people couldn’t, no matter how hard they tried.

  Mandy rocked back and forth in slow motion as she remembered the night her mother was taken away by the police. She’d vowed her life would never turn out like that, had sworn she would manage better. She’d been so sure she could take care of herself and Clare, as she had when they were kids. She’d tried so hard, endured so much, and look what happened.

  She’d dared think about a future filled with love and laughter and human warmth, human closeness. To have it snatched away like some silly daydream hurt twice as much as never having any hope at all.

  She’d never quite believed Bruce when he said he loved her. She’d been grateful to him for what he’d tried to do for her, for coming to see her while she was at the correction center and his promise of aid for Clare. She had hoped that gratitude and the compassion she felt for how much he seemed to care about her would be enough.

  It hadn’t been. It was never love he felt, but a form of obsession. He wanted her dependent on him. Systematically, he’d destroyed any chance they might have had for a future while trying to destroy her confidence. His insults for her lack of education, harping criticism as he attempted to mold her into the plastic female he wanted and, most of all, his lack of concern for her need for a family—all of it had shown how little she mattered to him as a person. In his world view, she’d existed for his satisfaction, no more, no less.