by Marta Perry
He held her tightly, their two dark heads very close. Melissa had found her way back to the heart where she belonged.
Sarah discovered that her throat was tight with tears. She lifted an unsteady hand to brush away the few that spilled over onto her cheeks. If she didn’t do another good thing while she was here, this would be enough.
She should leave them alone. She took a step back and Trent glanced up at the movement.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
“Yes.” He didn’t begin to know all that they needed to talk about, and when he did—Well, she’d deal with that hurdle when she came to it. “But not now. Right now you need to concentrate on Melissa.”
He nodded, turning away quickly, absorbed in his daughter. That was good. That was the way it should be.
But she couldn’t banish a sense of emptiness as she walked out of the room.
FIFTEEN
There was so much to discuss with Sarah, Trent didn’t know how he’d begin. He waited in his car at the clinic early the next afternoon, tapping his fingers on the wheel. She should be out soon, and they’d get things clear between them.
After the bombshell with Melissa that Sarah had somehow engineered, he’d been in shock. He’d resented—still did resent—the fact that Sarah had interfered, but he couldn’t argue with the results. He knew now what had come between him and Melissa.
Fury still burned inside him to think of his child’s anguish. He should have seen that more was going on than preadolescent moodiness. He should have made her tell him.
The clinic door opened. Sarah paused, shading her eyes against the brilliant sunshine, spotted him and started toward the car. The moment she slid inside, he knew something had happened. She positively sparked with impatience and energy.
“Esther told me where Lizbet is.” She snapped her seat belt with a decided click. “She found out for me.” She said that as if it meant something special.
He turned the ignition. “Where? I’ll drive you.” His own patience strained at the leash.
She handed him a slip of paper. “Esther wrote out the directions. Do you know the place?”
He spun out of the parking lot. “We’ll find it. What did she tell you? Where has Lizbet been?”
“Apparently she’s been staying with this distant cousin since the night I tried to see her.” She glanced across at him. “She was attacked that night, too, but a neighbor found her before the police arrived. They’ve been hiding her ever since.”
That surprised him less than it obviously did Sarah. Lizbet’s community took care of their own, and if they could avoid contact with the police, they did. “That washes out the chief’s theory that you were attacked by a random thief.”
“I never believed that, in any event.” She frowned, leaning forward as if to make the car go faster.
“What does Lizbet say about what happened?”
“Nothing, according to Esther. She hasn’t talked, and no one’s pushed her. But Esther says she wants to see me.”
“Maybe she’ll level with you.” No point in ranting about why it had taken the woman this long to decide to talk. “You may as well relax. This is as fast as I can go on these roads.”
“Sorry.” She leaned back, her green eyes darkening with concern when she looked at him. “How is Melissa doing?”
“Much better. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk last night, but—” He shook his head, still surprised by what happened. “Melissa wanted to go to the cemetery where my grandparents are buried.” His throat thickened at the memory of his daughter’s straight, slim figure kneeling at his grandmother’s grave, flowers in her hands. “Afterward we stopped at a restaurant and talked for hours.”
“That’s the best thing you could have done.” Her voice was warm. “I didn’t intend to interfere. Melissa walked in on me when I’d found that note and just blurted it out.”
He nodded. He shouldn’t be angry with Sarah because she’d found out what he couldn’t.
“About the notes—” she began.
“I took them to a lab in Savannah—the one you received and a few that Melissa hadn’t destroyed. They have better facilities than the local police. We’ll see what they make of them.”
“Computer printouts will be hard to trace.”
“This lab is the best. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it.” He smacked his hand against the steering wheel. “I want to know how the notes got into Melissa’s room, and your room, for that matter. Only someone with access to Land’s End could do that.”
“There is someone.” She hesitated. “Joanna Larson.”
He read the strain in her voice when she said the name. “You don’t have to tell me. She spilled the whole thing after she’d talked to you.”
“I haven’t seen her since.” There was an unspoken question in the words.
“She’s gone,” he said shortly. He hated messy scenes, and the scene with Joanna had been well over the top. “We both agreed she’d do better elsewhere. I gave her a generous severance and a glowing reference and sent her on her way.”
Sarah nodded, but her brow wrinkled. “She could have been the one to leave the notes. She certainly had access.”
“But no reason to torment Melissa that way.” His jaw clenched painfully. “Why? That’s what I want to know. Why?”
Sarah pushed her hair back from her face with both hands, gripping her head as if she’d force an answer from her mind. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Frankly, I’d like to believe Miles was involved with both Joanna and Lynette, but I can’t. It’s plain absurd.”
She winced at his words, and he regretted them. Was there nothing they could say to each other that wouldn’t cause pain?
“Why was Miles at the cottage that day?” she said. “We keep coming back to that.”
“Maybe we’re about to get answers. This is the house.” He pulled into an overgrown driveway next to a tobacco shed, cut the engine and opened the door. Hot, humid air rushed at them, carrying with it the fecund scents of the marsh. “Let’s go.”
As they approached the sagging porch, he let her go ahead. The woman had asked for Sarah, not him. He’d have to contain the fierce impatience that drove him if he wanted answers.
Sarah rapped at the door. For a long moment nothing happened. Then he heard the shuffle of footsteps, saw a curtain twitch as someone satisfied herself as to who was there. The door creaked open.
He’d seen Lizbet Jackson before, so he was prepared. He suspected Sarah held back a gasp at first sight.
Lizbet stood nearly six feet tall, and her erect posture belied her seventy or so years. The colorful head scarf she wore hid her hair and may have been what allowed her to escape the attack with a mild concussion instead of something more serious. The equally colorful long robe glowed against the dim interior of the cabin.
“You’ve come at last.” She reached a hand toward Sarah, gold bracelets jingling a tune. “I be waitin’ and waitin’ for you, and you never come.”
Sarah blinked, obviously not expecting that. “I tried to visit you at your house. The man who attacked you attacked me, too. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I led him to you.”
That was Sarah, taking responsibility on herself, he thought. It wasn’t her fault that some maniac—
No. He stopped himself. There was no random maniac, however comforting that theory might be. There was logic behind everything that had happened, if only they could see it.
“You don’t carry the burden for the evil that lives in that soul, chile. You here now. That’s all that counts. Come in.” She drew Sarah across her doorstep.
Trent waited, letting her look at him. He wouldn’t attempt to enter without her invitation.
“All right.” She inclined her head regally. “Come’yuh, too. Guess you got the right to hear what I got to say.”
She crossed to a rocking chair next to the room’s fireplace. She sat, and Sarah jerked involuntarily when a black
cat jumped into the woman’s lap.
“Set. Set.” She gestured toward two straight chairs opposite her.
Staged, he thought. She’d known they’d both come.
Lizbet rocked once or twice, taking her time. She stroked the cat with a strong, long-fingered hand. “I knew you’d come one day.” Her black eyes focused on Sarah. “I knew you’d come to learn the trute o’what happened that day on Cat Isle.”
Sarah’s heart seemed to stop at the woman’s words. She knew. Lizbet knew something about Miles’s death. She felt Trent’s tension, strung as tightly as her own.
“You were there that day, weren’t you?” That had to be it.
Lizbet’s black eyes lost focus, as if she looked back in time. She fingered the gold cross that hung at her throat.
“Done took my little boat over to gather the moss for poultices. S’pose you know I be a granny, a healer, you’d say.”
Sarah nodded, her nails biting into her palms. “Did you know someone was at the cottage?”
Lizbet nodded. “Thought it was funny, but none of my business. I heard a boat leave, and I thought they was gone.”
Her breath caught. A boat had left?
A shiver broke Lizbet’s calm. “I went closer, saw they was still two boats at the dock, but no sound from the house. Seemed the good Lord was telling me I had to go look, so I did.”
“The fumes—” she began, but Lizbet shook her head.
“I left the door open. Didn’t take a minute to see they was both dead.” Her eyes focused on them. “You got to believe, if there was any chance, I’d a done more. But I seen plenty of dead folk in my time, and they was gone.”
“Where were they?” Trent’s voice was so harsh she barely recognized it.
“Woman lay on the sofa, man on the floor. There was a little pad of paper on the table, and a pen. And a note.”
Trent jerked as if he’d been shot. “My wife left a note? What did it say? What happened to it?”
“I took it,” Lizbet said calmly. “It wasn’t true, was it? Note say she and the man kill themselves for love, but I know better, don’t I? I hear t’other boat leave. Someone with evil in his heart wanted folks to think they killed themselves when they didn’t.”
“You should have turned it over to the police. Told them what you heard.” Trent’s voice was ragged.
Sarah gave him a warning touch. He glanced toward her, took a deep breath and nodded.
The woman watched that byplay with wise old eyes. “I don’t hold much with police. Thought about coming to you, but how did I know t’wasn’t you in the other boat?”
“It wasn’t,” he said shortly.
Lizbet rocked, as if the movement soothed her. “I had to think on it.” Her eyes met Sarah’s, and it felt as if the wisdom of generations was held in that dark gaze. “It come to me that you were the one to have the note. When I heard you were back, I knew you’d come. Trouble was, I put it in the cash box I use when I sells my herbs. Couple weeks ago, some no-count took the box and the note with it. If’n the man who attacked us wanted it, he was too late.” She spread her hands out, palms up, empty. “So I got nothing to give you but my story.”
“If I get a police officer to come to you, will you tell the story again? Sign your name to it?” Trent leaned forward.
She assessed him for a moment and then nodded. “I will.” She rocked again, closing her eyes. Their audience was over.
Sarah got up, feeling as if she’d aged twenty years in the twenty minutes they’d sat there. “Thank you.”
Lizbet opened her eyes. “You be careful now, y’heah? You on a dangerous path.”
“It’s the one God set me on.” She hadn’t said that to anyone else, but it seemed right to say it to Lizbet.
She nodded. “You got to stay on it then, come what may.”
“I’ll be in touch about the statement.” Trent frowned. “Maybe you’d be safer if you came back to Land’s End with us.”
“No.” A shiver seemed to go through her. “I got my own kin around me now. I be safe.”
There was clearly no use in pressing the subject, and the woman was probably right. Safety was in short supply on St. James just now. Even at Land’s End, malice moved unchecked.
She let Trent lead her to the car, her mind moving a thousand miles an hour. How? Who? The avalanche of discoveries was threatening to bury her.
One of those discoveries, at least, she hadn’t shared with Trent yet, and she had to. He had a right to know, especially if—Her mind stopped there. Could she possibly picture Jonathan, urbane, detached Jonathan who seemed to care little about anything, killing two people?
Trent started the car, sending a welcome rush of cool air from the vents. He pulled back onto the narrow road.
She swallowed. “At least now we know.”
His frown deepened. “Do we?”
“You heard what Lizbet said. You surely don’t believe she was lying.” The woman’s story had had the undeniable ring of truth. Sarah had been so caught up that she’d almost seemed to see what Lizbet had that terrible day.
“I believe she told the truth, as far as it went. But her interpretation isn’t necessarily correct.” His detached tone didn’t fool Sarah. He was clamping down on fierce emotion, and if he clamped down too hard he just might explode.
She suppressed the impulse to argue. “I suppose. If you believe strongly in coincidence, you might accept that someone else came to the cottage, found them dead and ran away without ever speaking of it. And the attacks on Lizbet and me, the notes Melissa and I received—”
“All right.” His hand sliced through the air, cutting off whatever else she might have said. “Granted. Someone has guilty knowledge, whether he committed a double murder or not. And he’s willing to attack anyone who gets in his way.”
He jerked the wheel savagely as he turned onto the main road, and she grasped the armrest.
“Sorry.” He glanced at her, his tone moderating. “Do you know why I came here, built Land’s End?”
The question startled her. “I suppose this felt like home to you, because of your grandparents.”
“That’s true, but not all of it.” His thoughts engraved lines around his mouth. “A man in my position makes enemies. When Lynette was pregnant with Melissa, we lived in Atlanta. A man broke into the house one night—a crackpot convinced I’d stolen one of his ideas. If I hadn’t come home when I did—”
He stopped, but he didn’t need to finish the thought. Her imagination was vivid enough to do that.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“I built Land’s End, moved my headquarters here, where I could protect them.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and his pain reached across the space between them to clutch at her heart. “It didn’t do any good, did it? I couldn’t protect them, even here.”
“It’s not your fault.” The words were useless. Trent couldn’t stop blaming himself any more than she could.
He didn’t even bother to respond to that. “If Lizbet was right, someone killed them and tried to make it look like suicide. And I was so willing to believe the worst of my wife that I bought into it, even without the note he’d planted.”
Her heart ached for him. “Anyone might think that, under the circumstances.”
“You didn’t.”
No, she hadn’t. “I came back to find the truth.”
“Are we ever going to know the truth—all of it?”
She had to tell him, no matter what the cost. “Yesterday I found another piece of it. I’ve wanted to tell you, but life keeps interfering.”
He gave a wry smile. “An understatement if ever I heard one. Well, we’re alone now. What is it?”
“Melissa gave me a piece of jewelry she’d found hidden in her mother’s room. She thought—she assumed—that Miles had given it to her, but of course he hadn’t.”
His lips tightened. “Obviously I was wrong to think I’d protected Melissa from the gossip.”
“Robert Butler recognized the piece. He knows the artist. He knew that it was sold to Jonathan Lee.”
For an instant his face didn’t change. Then he abruptly pulled off the road, into the deserted parking lot of a shuttered restaurant. “Jonathan.” He turned toward her. “You should have told me right away.”
“You weren’t there. Besides—” She shook her head. She wouldn’t get into the dreadful scene with Joanna that had wiped everything else from her mind. “I’m telling you now.”
“I can’t believe it. There must be some other explanation. Jonathan wouldn’t—”
She couldn’t let him go on. “I confronted him. He admitted it. I’m sorry, Trent. He admitted that he and Lynette had an affair.” She took a deep breath. “He also said he knew you were out in the boat that day. He implied that Gifford hushed up the investigation because of you.”
He leaned toward her, very close in the confines of the car. “Is that what you believe, Sarah? That I’m a murderer?”
“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be here with you, would I?” It took an effort to hold her voice steady.
His gray eyes bored into hers, as if he’d see into her soul. “But there’s a shred of doubt there, isn’t there?” He shook his head. “No, don’t bother to answer. Anyone would doubt. You saw one of the anonymous letters that vilified Lynette. I didn’t show you the ones that accuse me of murder.”
She wanted answers, but she was absolutely no good at confrontations. Sarah had pushed her chair as far back as it would go in the corner of Trent’s study, but it wasn’t far enough. The emotions that filled the room assaulted her.
Jonathan sat opposite Trent. He’d abandoned his usual casual air, sitting bolt upright, looking with distaste at the occupant of the other chair.
Chief Gifford had planted himself firmly, feet apart, elbows on his knees. His attitude suggested a bulldoglike intensity as he glared at Jonathan.
“You saying my force didn’t do its proper job?” His tone was just short of a bellow.
“I just repeated what I’ve heard.” Jonathan drew a bit farther from him. “People talk.”
