From This Day On

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “No, it’s okay. But I want to go home now.”

  He grasped both of her upper arms. “To hide? Or to look him up?”

  Both. “To look him up,” she lied.

  “You can do it now, if you want. You can use my Droid.”

  Of course he’d noticed she still carried an old flip phone, practically an antique.

  Amy shook her head almost frantically. “No. Thank you, but I’d rather do it at home when I can be...”

  “Alone?” His voice, gone brutally hard, cut her off. “Not a chance.”

  That made her stiffen. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re not going to go crawl into your hidey-hole at your mother’s house and be miserable by yourself.”

  “I will if I want to,” she snapped, knowing immediately how utterly childish that sounded but not caring. “You’ve been nice. I appreciate it. It doesn’t give you the right to...” Be the boss of me. Amy managed, barely, to contain yet another schoolyard refrain. “To tell me what to do,” she concluded. Which wasn’t actually any more adult.

  “But I’m going to, anyway.” His jaw had tightened in a way she’d begun to recognize meant he was angry. “If you want to research him now, this afternoon, we’ll head back to your house—or we can go to mine—and do it together.”

  She wasn’t accustomed to feeling such a bewildering mix of emotions. Churning hate and the curiosity—of which she was ashamed, and confusion, too. All that probably made her more volatile. Right now, she was blazingly angry at Jakob, but also glad he refused to let her do this alone.

  The glad part upset her most of all, because it was so out of character for her.

  “Come on.” He boosted her out of the small, private room and just as quickly took her arm and started her walking toward the exit from the tea garden.

  Short of revolting entirely and calling a taxi or planting herself at the closest bus stop, she was stuck with him until he returned her to her car. It was probably the restful atmosphere of the garden that made his hand gradually loosen its grip on her arm and her fury to lessen into mere fuming.

  “Jakob,” she said finally, looking straight ahead, “you’ve already wasted days on me. Okay, you were nosy. And ticked at your dad, too. I understand. But this is getting ridiculous.”

  They’d reached the car park. His fingers tightened again and he stopped her. His eyes, she saw when they faced each other, were closer to a wintry gray than the brighter blue she was used to seeing.

  “Wasted? Is that what you think of yourself?”

  To her astonishment, Amy found herself speechless. Oh, God, she thought. That is what I think. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she protested, but weakly.

  His jaw flexed. “Yes, you did. And no, nothing about you is a waste of my time. I had...issues when we were kids, but I never thought of you as worthless. Not once. Got it?”

  Her head bobbed. She was mesmerized by the expression on his face, even though she didn’t understand it.

  “This thing with your mother, with Dad, with the guy who raped your mother, we’re in it together. You need answers, and we’ll find them together. Don’t try to get rid of me, because I guarantee you’ll fail.”

  No masterful man had ever turned her into a bobblehead doll before, but apparently there was a first time for everything. She nodded again.

  “Good,” Jakob said, sounding satisfied, and once again steered her toward his car. “Your house or mine?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHUFFLING FORWARD WITH the rest of the people in line to get through security at the courthouse, Amy tried very hard not to fidget. She had nothing to be nervous about. The worst that could happen was that she wouldn’t be allowed in the courtroom once she got that far. Were mere curiosity seekers allowed in at all? Either way, enough had been written about this particular trial, seating might be limited and the doors barred once the room was full.

  And maybe that would even be a relief.

  She looked at her watch for the thirtieth time, even though she had no deadline. It wasn’t as if she needed to be there for the beginning of the day’s proceedings, or planned to stay long, for that matter. All she wanted was to see him.

  Jakob didn’t know what she was doing today. If he had, she knew he’d have insisted on coming with her, and no matter what he said, this was one thing she had to do alone.

  Friday when they’d gotten back to her mother’s house, it hadn’t taken five minutes to verify his suspicion. They could have used Jakob’s Droid, no problem, and found the same information. There was Steven Hardy’s bio, in black-and-white. B.A. Wakefield College, J.D. University of Washington. He had achieved his B.A. two years before Amy’s mother had gotten hers from the University of Oregon, which made his age right.

  The most difficult part had been studying pictures of him. With Jakob looking over her shoulder, Amy had located several online.

  She tried to tell herself she felt no sense of recognition at all. Yes, they did share a similar hair color—she couldn’t tell about the curls, because this man’s was cropped short—and okay, maybe eye color, too, although it was hard to tell from relatively small photos posted on the internet. Like hers, his chin was more pointed than square. He was smiling in one picture, intense and determined in the others.

  She hadn’t been able to look at the pictures long.

  Jakob, sitting beside her, had asked what she thought.

  “I don’t know,” Amy said, breathing hard. “I can’t see it.”

  His eyes were a soft gray-blue again, warm with compassion. He didn’t say a word.

  She had said politely, “I’m going to check my email,” and he left her alone for a blessed few minutes, when she managed to quit shaking.

  Her mother had finally emailed her.

  Clearly, we need to talk in person.

  She’d given her flight information and asked Amy to let her know if she’d be available to pick her up at the airport when she arrived on Tuesday.

  Typical Mom—of course she didn’t bother with expressing any regrets, any annoyance at Amy for inconveniently resurrecting the past, for sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

  But she was coming. Whatever that meant, Amy thought, not sure how she felt about her mother’s visit. One more thing to be confused about.

  She did talk to Jakob about her horribly mixed feelings, but she didn’t dwell on the subject and was relieved when he didn’t press her. It was too hard to explain what you didn’t understand yourself.

  She ended up spending most of the weekend with him. He didn’t stay at the house, which was a relief to her for reasons she didn’t examine, but Saturday he’d taken her on a hike up toward Mt. Hood. She had the impression he thought she needed to be kept busy.

  He called the hike a stroll. Which meant athletic shoes were fine for today, he told her. “But if we’re going to do more, we’ll need to outfit you with hiking boots.”

  The we gave her a secret glow.

  The trail was only three and a half miles long, circling Lost Lake, but for someone who hadn’t done much outdoors stuff, she found the experience amazing. There were spectacular views of the volcanic mountain across the smooth water of the lake. A sturdy boardwalk had been built across wetlands Jakob referred to as a cedar bog. Stretches led through forest that felt deep and primitive to her. They ate their lunch sitting on a rock on the lake shore, dangling bare feet in the icy cold, astonishingly clear water. She’d been entranced by the tiny fish darting around the rock and also, more privately, by the sight of his feet, long, bony and masculine.

  Jakob, she thought, had enjoyed her pleasure, and she had the sense the outing had quieted some restlessness that was building in him.

  She asked him on the drive back to the city, and watched as his fingers flexed on the ste
ering wheel.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “I need to recharge sometimes. Usually I load up a pack and head into the backcountry, where there are fewer people.”

  The Lost Lake trail had been surprisingly busy, Amy would concede. Most of the time they had been able to hear other voices. The trailhead was close enough to Portland to make it an easy day’s outing, and the hike short enough for families. Older kids scrambled like mountain goats on the large rocks that formed the scree slope, stared in fascination into the boggy waters from behind the safety of the boardwalk railing, and squealed when they discovered how cold the lake water was. Even so, compared to city streets, Amy hadn’t had the sense of being crowded.

  “And I thought I was the loner,” she said, making a face at him.

  He laughed. “I don’t always go alone. I have friends who enjoy backpacking, too.”

  Probably female friends, she had thought acidly, then been ashamed of herself. Their relationship wasn’t...whatever that spurt of jealousy suggested.

  He probably still thought of her as a sister and assumed she thought of him as her brother, even though they now knew they weren’t really related at all. They had only been stepsiblings, and that was long ago.

  How else would she think of him? she asked herself, but didn’t allow any answers. She was very careful to turn her mind in another direction.

  Sunday they’d driven west on Highway 30 to the historic port town of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria, she already knew, was the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, established when John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Company there in 1811. She teased Jakob that he felt a kinship with Astor because they shared a name.

  Mostly, they walked along the waterfront and climbed some hills to look at the gorgeous historic mansions, decorated in elaborate gingerbread and painted in mouthwatering combinations of colors. Some had been converted to bed-and-breakfast inns. She had the wistful thought that it would have been fun to stay in one. For lunch they had fish and chips and watched an enormous cargo ship led by a pilot boat across what a waitress at the restaurant told them was a dangerous river bar where powerful river currents met ocean waves.

  “This is the second weekend in a row we’ve spent together,” Amy observed, after a long, peaceful silence during the drive back to Portland.

  She had been very aware of Jakob’s glance.

  “So it is,” he said in his deep, lazy voice, the one he didn’t use during the occasional business phone call.

  “Do you plan to go back to work tomorrow?” she asked, hoping she sounded completely casual. She didn’t want him to suspect her plans.

  He scrutinized her again before returning his attention to the now four-lane highway. “I guess I’d better.”

  “Me, too.”

  She had already told him what she was working on, a story about motorized bicycles—the kits to convert regular bikes, tips, pluses and minuses, and the fact that, as long as the motor had less than one horsepower and the bike went less than twenty miles an hour on a flat surface, the operator didn’t need to have a motor vehicle license. They were still something of an oddity, but getting to be more common. She’d interviewed people who sold the kits or already-outfitted bikes, who rode them, who’d tried one and gotten rid of it.

  “Same safety drawbacks as a regular bicycle,” he had observed, and she nodded. In preparation for writing the article, she’d taken several test rides—or were they drives?—and found them exhilarating. She’d also been a little panicky when she got off. Amy didn’t think she’d ever feel truly comfortable riding a bike again after her accident. She was afraid this article, too, was an attempt to distance herself from the experience.

  Jakob dropped her off without suggesting dinner, which left her feeling momentarily bereft and then exasperated with herself. For heaven’s sake, the last thing she could afford was to get dependent on him!

  On anyone at all.

  Besides, being left alone meant she was free to do some further research online and sneak a few more uneasy looks at pictures of the man whose genes she shared.

  She was disturbed to find that he seemed to be respected within the legal community. He was described as an effective trial attorney, but not given to melodrama. His low-key style allowed jurors to relax and focus on what he was telling them. He was known to mentor newcomers to the office of the district attorney. She read about several attention-getting cases in which he’d been the lead prosecuting attorney. One involved a serial rapist who had finally strangled a victim. Amy stared at that headline cached on the Oregonian site.

  What if she and Jakob were wrong? What if more than one Steven Hardy had graduated from Wakefield within a few years of each other?

  The image of a faceless monster didn’t line up with the dedicated deputy district attorney’s. How was it possible that they were one and the same?

  The current, well-publicized trial was of a businessman alleged to have burned down a warehouse for the insurance money without realizing a homeless family was sleeping in it. A man, woman and young child had all died of smoke inhalation. Amy had missed the chance to watch Hardy in action; this week, the defense was taking their turn to convince the jury that the evidence already presented was flawed. That was fine—all Amy wanted was to set eyes on him. A part of her was convinced that she would know, on some kind of cellular level, once she saw him.

  And she definitely wanted to do this before she had to talk to her mother about what happened.

  At last she was cleared through security that reminded her of the airport and was able to ask for directions to the courtroom. She had dressed today in hopes of blending in. In her snug-fitting, dark russet suit, she could have been an attorney who belonged here. Or a journalist. They must be in and out all the time. In a way, she was one, right?

  Nobody seemed to pay any attention to her. The traffic was brisk going into that particular courtroom. Inside, the buzz of talk made her realize the judge had yet to appear. The jury box, too, was still empty. Maybe he wasn’t there yet, either. Her heart drummed as she walked down the center aisle, pretending to scan the front rows for a seat even though they were all full.

  A railing separated spectators from the floor of the courtroom. On the other side of it, three people sat to the left behind a table, their heads bent together as they talked intensely. To the right, a woman was already seated at another table but two men stood talking. Both wore suits and she presumed were attorneys. One was a thin young black man whose manner was as intense as his opponents’ on the other side of the courtroom; the other, not very tall, had his back to her, but her gaze settled on his reddish brown hair, and she came to a stop, not fifteen feet from him.

  The lawyer whose face she could see gestured; the other man nodded, quick and sharp. Amy couldn’t do anything but stare, even though she knew vaguely that she was beginning to draw attention, just standing there.

  The conversation appeared to finish. Time and motion seemed to have slowed down, in an unreal way that felt dreamlike. The man with hair the color of hers turned as if to take a seat. His glance passed without interest over the spectators, including Amy, and he stepped behind the table and started to pull a chair out. Then he went very still and swung back around, his gaze locking on Amy.

  He and Amy stared at each other. All she could think was, Of course he’s my father. Anyone looking at the two of us would know.

  He knows.

  Her head swam, probably because she hadn’t breathed in way too long. With a gasp, she turned and fled, walking faster and faster until she was nearly running by the time she reached the huge double doors. Someone opened one just as she reached it, and she escaped into the lobby.

  Amy found a restroom, hiding in a stall until she regained her composure.

  No, she told herself, of course he had no way to guess who s
he might be. It might only be the way she had been staring at him that had caught his eye. Prominent attorneys probably got wary of crazy members of a defendant’s family, or weird courtroom groupies, or whatever.

  Finally leaving the toilet stall, she washed her hands and then met her eyes in the mirror. She was paler than she ought to be, which made her freckles stand out and her eyes dominate her face. And this was after she’d had time to get a grip. A few minutes ago, in that courtroom staring at her father the rapist, she probably hadn’t looked quite sane.

  She didn’t feel all that sane, truthfully.

  Amy was ashamed to discover that she wished Jakob was waiting out there for her. He would have taken another morning off work and come along if she’d asked.

  I had to do this alone.

  Somehow the stubborn defense didn’t ring as true as it usually would. The unsettling truth was, he had been with her as much as she’d allowed this past ten days. His motives might still be a mystery, but she did know he wanted to see her all the way through this.

  She walked slowly down the broad steps of the courthouse and to her car, parked several blocks away. She was almost there when her phone rang, making her jump. Amy dug it out of her purse and looked at the number, feeling a surge of gladness.

  “Hi, Jakob.”

  “Hey.” He sounded casual enough. “What are you up to?”

  She took a deep breath. “I just left the courthouse. I had to see him.”

  “Goddamn it!” Jakob roared. “I knew it.”

  Amy stiffened, her feet stopping. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You had this in mind yesterday, didn’t you? Would you have told me what you planned if I’d asked?”

  She hesitated, feeling a little guilty. “I don’t know.” The silence seemed to simmer. “I was, um, just thinking about calling to see if you had time to meet me for lunch.”

  “You wouldn’t have done it, would you? You’d have decided you were bothering me.”