“Thanks for telling me.” Jill did nothing to console her landlady, cementing Dan’s impression that something was seriously off. “I’ll pick him up and leave from Dan’s house, then.”
“Oh, please don’t do that!” Mrs. Feldman cried. She clutched at the porch railing, as though for support. “Chris left so suddenly I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. Please bring him back here before you go.”
“I don’t think—” Jill began.
Mrs. Feldman sniffled, and Jill didn’t finish her sentence. Jill nodded. “I can do that.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Feldman wiped under her eyes with the pads of her fingers, then nodded toward the house. Her voice wavered, as though she was struggling not to cry. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
The landlady disappeared inside the house with Jill watching. Jill’s shoulders seemed to shake before she squared them, turned back around and headed for the sidewalk that ran adjacent to the street. Dan was quicker than she was, stepping in front of her and blocking her path.
“Get out of my way, Dan.” She didn’t raise her head, but there was a definite quiver in her voice. He tipped up her chin. Moisture swam in her eyes.
“Not until you tell me what’s really going on,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JILL BLINKED AWAY her tears, bringing Dan’s face into focus. His expression was both tender and determined.
The morning was going nothing like she’d planned. She and Chris were already supposed to be on the road, heading away from the town and the people they’d come to love.
She hadn’t anticipated Felicia tearfully claiming her life wouldn’t be the same without them, Chris stealing away to be with the pygmy goats or Dan showing up.
Most of all, she hadn’t counted on this being the moment she realized she loved him.
The feeling had been coming on gradually since that barbecue with the Pollocks. It had crystallized over time as she’d watched his dealings with Chris and gotten to know him as a man of substance.
Yet she’d refused to put a name on her emotions. Admitting to herself that she loved Dan would have meant telling him the truth. For how could she love a man if she couldn’t trust him with her deepest secrets?
“Tell me what’s going on, Jill,” he repeated, his fingers still touching her chin. There were smudges under his eyes, as though he hadn’t gotten much sleep. Because of her, no doubt.
Thoughts swirled inside her head like leaves in the wind.
No matter how much she ached to explain her predicament, that would take time and she had a terrible sense her time was running out. The moment when she should have confided in Dan was already past.
“It’s too late,” she whispered.
He flinched as though she’d struck him. He dropped his hand from her cheek, his eyes grew hooded and he stepped back from her.
Blood roared in her ears, nearly obliterating the sounds of his dogs panting and an approaching car. She should say she was sorry, except she wouldn’t be able to explain what she was apologizing for.
A car door opened and shut. Someone had parked along the curb and was walking toward them. She looked past Dan and gasped.
It was her father.
He looked older than when she’d last seen him, his hair considerably grayer, his posture not quite as erect. Unfamiliar lines bracketed his mouth and eyes.
“I found you, Jill.” Her father had never been a volatile man, but anger vibrated from him. His voice shook. “It’s over.”
She’d had nightmares about this scenario. In those dark dreams she was always alone, a solitary woman determined to keep fighting for her brother. Now Dan positioned himself between Jill and her father, looming over the older man by a good five or six inches.
“Don’t come any closer,” he warned in a low, ominous voice.
Despair reached inside Jill and burrowed. Not only had she failed Chris, she was about to introduce Dan, a man who was ready to leap to her defense, to the father she’d claimed was dead.
“It’s all right, Dan.” She laid a hand on his arm and felt the tension in his coiled muscles. “This is Mark Jacobi. My father.”
“Your father.” He repeated the words without surprise, yet his head shook back and forth. Once again she couldn’t look him in the eye, afraid of what she’d see.
“Who are you?” her father asked him.
Dan moved his arm, and she was forced to drop her hand. “Dan Maguire. I’m a…friend of your daughter’s.”
Her father’s gaze flickered to the packed car. “A friend, huh? If you were a true friend, you wouldn’t help her. You would have told her to give me back my son.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dan said flatly.
“Jill took Chris without my permission.” Her father stood just off the sidewalk, in the dewy grass. He didn’t seem to notice his shoes were getting damp. “That was more than a year ago.”
Jill dared not try to gauge Dan’s reaction. She needed to keep her wits about her in case an opportunity presented itself to give her father the slip. “How did you find me?”
“Ralph Tomlin said his daughter ran into you. My P.I. made some calls and came up with this address last night. This morning I chartered a plane. I couldn’t risk that you’d run again.” Her father relayed the facts with what sounded like barely controlled fury, but Jill wasn’t fooled. Stark pain shadowed his eyes.
“I never meant to hurt you, Daddy.” Jill felt as though a vice was gripping her heart. “But I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave Chris in the same house as Arianne.”
“Chris lied about that!” her father cried. “Arianne never did anything to him.”
“How would you know?” Jill retorted. “You have such a blind spot about her, you can’t see anything clearly.”
“Would someone tell me what’s going on?” Dan still stood between them, closer to Jill than her father, his expression unreadable.
She tried to explain, but her father interrupted every time she said something negative about Arianne. Clearly his feelings about his third wife hadn’t changed. Finally she gave up, unsure if she’d been able to convey to Dan the gravity of the situation.
“You can see that the story’s preposterous.” Her father took a step toward Felicia’s house. “Where’s my son? Is he in there?”
“No,” Jill said while she desperately tried to figure out how to keep her father and brother apart. If the two of them crossed paths, she’d be unable to prevent her father from taking Chris back to Atlanta.
“Don’t lie to me,” her father warned. “I know Chris is living with you.”
“I’m not lying,” Jill said. “He’s not inside the house. He’s somewhere safe.”
“I haven’t called the cops because you’re my daughter. But believe me, this time I will.” He abruptly turned to Dan. “Do you want to see her go to jail?”
“Don’t threaten her,” Dan said in a low growl.
“Then you tell me where my son is,” her father demanded.
Jill intercepted Dan’s gaze, silently pleading with him to remain quiet. She thought of her ex-boyfriend Ray Williams, insisting he had an obligation to tell her father Jill’s plans. She waited for Dan’s response.
“Your son’s somewhere safe.” Dan repeated the same words she’d used. “If you want him back, you’ll have to give your daughter some assurances.”
It had been so long since Jill had had someone in her corner fighting for her that she almost wept with relief.
“What!” her father exclaimed. “That’s not the way it works. I have the law on my side.”
“Then let’s sit down and talk. Your daughter wouldn’t have done this without good reason. You owe it to your son to hear her out.” Dan had no reason to believe in Jill, yet spoke with conviction.
“Why should I?” her father retorted. “Look, Social Services already investigated. They found nothing.”
“They must have been wrong,” Dan stated forcefully. �
��You could at least listen to Jill’s reasons.”
“I already know her reasons.”
“Not until you let her talk without interrupting her, you don’t,” Dan said sternly, and she fell a little deeper in love with him. “Listen first, then tell your side of the story.”
Her father said nothing for several long minutes, a muscle working in his jaw. “Okay,” he finally said.
The pressure on Jill’s chest lessened. There were no guarantees talking would work, but at least it was a start. She tried to catch Dan’s eyes, to convey how extremely grateful she was, but he wouldn’t look at her.
The vice on her heart tightened again.
JILL’S FATHER WAS NO FOOL.
Before he entered Mrs. Feldman’s house, he demanded assurances that his son wouldn’t be whisked out of town while he was preoccupied. He listened in while Dan phoned Annie Whitmore and asked her to pick up Chris, then reiterated he’d call the cops if necessary.
“Thanks for the coffee and the muffins,” Mark Jacobi told Mrs. Feldman once they were indoors. Dan sat at one end of the kitchen table, between father and daughter.
“Think nothing of it.” The landlady hovered over them, her tears dried but her eyes red rimmed. She’d seemed as surprised as Dan to be introduced to Jill’s father. He wondered if she’d also been under the impression that Mr. Jacobi was dead. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
Nobody spoke until the sound of Mrs. Feldman’s foot steps faded as she climbed the stairs. Even though the landlady must be brimming with curiosity, she hadn’t asked questions.
Jill’s father, however, was full of them.
“I keep asking myself how my own daughter could do something like this to me.” Mr. Jacobi focused on Jill’s solemn, worried face. “So make me understand.”
The house smelled of coffee and the homemade blueberry muffins none of them had touched. Starsky and Hutch barked playfully in the backyard where Dan had left them. Mr. Jacobi hadn’t blinked at Dan’s continued presence, apparently believing Dan was in Jill’s circle of trust.
Trust.
Dan’s gut twisted at the irony intrinsic in the word. He’d wholeheartedly trusted Jill ever since they’d met, positive she was the opposite of his secretive ex-fiancée.
Yet Jill had lied to him, too.
Her father wasn’t dead, her brother wasn’t an orphan and she wasn’t the woman she’d claimed to be.
“I never meant to hurt you, Daddy,” Jill pleaded, sounding every inch a Southerner. Dan had once teasingly accused her of toning down her accent. Now he understood he’d been on the money. “I did what I had to do to protect Chris.”
A muted buzzing noise sounded. Mr. Jacobi started, then patted his pocket where the outline of a cell phone was visible.
“I can look out for my own son.” Mr. Jacobi put both hands on the table, the veins in them visible. “It’s insulting for you to imply that I can’t.”
“How can you protect Chris if you won’t accept there’s something to protect him from?” Jill asked. “I know you don’t believe Arianne abused Chris—”
“The social worker who came out to investigate didn’t believe it, either,” Mr. Jacobi repeated.
“The social worker said she couldn’t prove abuse because Chris didn’t have any marks or bruises,” Jill rejoined. “That’s not the same as saying he hadn’t been abused.”
Dan let them talk, trying to put together the puzzle from the bits and pieces he’d learned. He knew Mr. Jacobi had married Arianne after Chris’s mother died, yet didn’t have a read on the woman. He did remember, however, that Arianne was the name of the bully Chris had told him about.
“Arianne never touched Chris,” Mr. Jacobi stated forcefully.
“But she told him he was worthless!” Jill protested. “She said she wished he’d never been born. She locked him in a closet so nobody would know when she left him home alone.”
“None of that happened.” Mr. Jacobi’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “You know your brother has a problem with lying.”
“He wouldn’t lie about those things!” Jill said. “He wouldn’t lie about Arianne threatening to kill him if he told anybody what she’d done!”
“That doesn’t sound like something a child would make up,” Dan interjected, figuring he’d been quiet long enough.
“Chris would do anything to break up me and Arianne,” Mr. Jacobi said. “You’ve got to understand where he’s coming from. He doesn’t want anyone to take his mother’s place.”
“That’s just ridiculous!” Jill cried.
“What’s ridiculous are the accusations Chris made.” Mr. Jacobi’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “I never heard Arianne say any of those things to him.”
“Now, I’m an outsider here,” Dan interjected, painfully aware of that fact, “but it seems to me your wife would try to keep the abuse from you.”
“What abuse? Why would she abuse him at all?” Mr. Jacobi leaned forward and posed the questions that had been rattling around in Dan’s mind.
“Let me tell you what I think,” Jill said. “Chris hasn’t talked about Arianne in months, but he said some things when we first left Atlanta.”
So Jill was from Atlanta, after all. A shaft of pain shot through Dan at the verification that she’d lied about her hometown. He quashed it and concentrated on her story, for Chris’s sake.
“Arianne told Chris she wouldn’t be stuck home taking care of a snot-nosed brat when she could be out enjoying herself,” Jill continued. “I think Chris interfered with the lifestyle she wanted to live.”
“You’re grabbing at straws,” Mr. Jacobi said. “Arianne knew when she married me I had a son.”
“She probably thought you’d hire a nanny,” Jill said.
“Chris had enough nannies after his mother died. He didn’t need another one. I told Arianne that up front and she was fine with it.”
“Except she might not have been,” Jill said. “Think about it, Daddy. You’re a good catch. Since you married Arianne, you bought a fancier car, moved into a bigger house and joined a country club.”
“What are you driving at?”
“Arianne suggested all of those things. Maybe she didn’t realize how much a child would cramp her style.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mr. Jacobi shook his head back and forth. “You hardly know Arianne. She loves me.”
“How well do you know her?” Jill countered. “You said she wasn’t from Atlanta. How do you know anything she’s told you about herself is true?”
“Jill has a point. Not everyone’s truthful.” Dan’s eyes touched on Jill. She looked away. “For your son’s sake, why not have somebody look into her background?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Mr. Jacobi said, and Dan could almost picture a steel door slamming shut. “Arianne is my wife!”
“And Chris is your son!” Jill countered. “I know you love him. So why don’t you do what’s best for him?”
“You think believing his lies about his stepmother is what’s best for him? It’s clear Chris needs counseling and I’ll get it for him,” he said. “But I’m through talking. I want my son. I demand you take me to him.”
His phone buzzed again. He took it out of his pocket with an impatient jerk of his hand, checked the small screen and frowned. “I need to get this.”
He excused himself, then went to the back porch to take the call, leaving Dan and Jill alone.
“He’s not listening to me.” Jill turned to Dan, her eyes huge and beseeching. “What am I going to do?”
Dan had been giving that very question copious thought. Despite how he felt about the lies she’d told him, his entire focus was on helping her do what was best for Chris. “Running away isn’t an option. I believe your father would call the police.”
“Me, too,” she said miserably, “but I can’t have my father take Chris back to Atlanta, either.”
“You could if you talked him into letting you stay in th
e house with them,” Dan said. “That way, you can make sure Chris is safe. In the meantime, hire Sara Brenneman to see if you have any legal recourse. Lawyers know who the reputable private eyes are. She can refer you to one who can check out Arianne’s background.”
“That makes perfect sense.” She reached across the table and laid a hand on his, her gaze soft. “You’ve been so great, Dan. I don’t know how I’d get through this without you.”
He slipped his hand out from under hers. “I’m doing it for Chris.”
Her brows drew together, her expression pained. Her lips parted, but before she could say anything the door opened and Mr. Jacobi walked back into the kitchen. His complexion had lost color, and he looked as though he’d aged ten years.
“That was Arianne.” He spoke in a monotone, his gaze unfocused. “She’s leaving me and filing for divorce.”
“I don’t understand.” Jill got up from the table and went to stand by her father. “I thought everything was fine between you.”
“She’s been having an affair.” Mr. Jacobi swallowed, and his chin shook slightly. “I even know the guy—this pretentious jerk who’s always at the country club. She says they’re in love.”
“Is he married, too?” Jill asked.
“Divorced. No kids. And about ten years younger than me.” Mr. Jacobi recited the facts in a monotone. “Arianne says he’s a better fit for her than I am.”
Jill looked as stunned as her father, even though the comments her father relayed seemed to confirm she’d been on the mark about Arianne. Dan couldn’t help thinking, however, that there was another chapter of the story to be written.
“Take a few minutes to yourself, Daddy,” Jill said gently. Dan was struck at how quickly she’d gone from protective of her brother to supportive of her father. “I’ll go to the Whitmores’ house and bring Chris back here.”
Mr. Jacobi nodded, then sank into one of the kitchen chairs. Despite the mistakes he’d made, Dan felt sorry for the man. He knew what it felt like to be blindsided by a woman.
The fog had burned off and the sun struggled to peek from behind the clouds when Dan walked with Jill onto the porch. She clutched at the railing the same way Felicia Feldman had earlier that morning.
That Runaway Summer Page 18
