Worth Dying For

by Beverly Barton

  Tug lifted his glass and took a hefty swig of tea, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Best iced tea in Rayville.”

  Neither Dante nor Tessa said a word, but both glared at Tug.

  Tug set his glass down, picked up his fork and speared the green beans on his plate. “There’s a woman—a close personal friend of mine, if you know what I mean—” Tug winked at Dante “—who works in medical records at the hospital and she’s got an aunt who used to work over at Maitland’s Funeral Home. The aunt’s name is Deanetta Knight. That old gal’s got a memory like an elephant. She don’t forget nothing.” Tug stuck the green beans in his mouth, then added a scoop of mashed potatoes. As he chewed, he eyed Dante, then swallowed. “Deanetta’s willing to talk to y’all, if you promise not to never tell nobody that you got the information from her.”

  “What does she have to tell us that’s worth your getting an extra thousand dollars?” Dante was fast losing patience with this good old boy.

  “That’s for her to say.” Tug put his fork aside and picked up the chicken leg. “But I’ll tell you this—she recalls when there was a gal found out on Interstate 20, about seventeen years ago. That’s when Deanetta was working for the funeral home.”

  “What does one thing have to do with the other?” Tessa asked.

  “Well, you see, Aaron Maitland, who owned the funeral home, was the county coroner back then,” Tug explained.

  A knot formed in the pit of Dante’s belly. “And?”

  “And Deanetta remembers that Sheriff Wadkins called in Aaron Maitland when a body was found on the side of the road.”

  “What’s strange about that?” Tessa glanced from Tug to Dante. “Isn’t it usual procedure for the coroner to be called—?”

  “Ma’am, the body Aaron did an autopsy on was a young, blond girl who’d been raped, beaten and dumped off the interstate.”

  Turning white as a sheet, Tessa gasped. Damn! She looked like she might faint.

  THE LITTLE BITCH! She’d done a complete about-face, transforming herself from a hysterical, out-of-control child into an astonishingly calm young lady. The way she’d acted at lunch today, no one would believe she was suicidal.

  I’ve never seen a better job of acting. Or was she acting? She had to be. She couldn’t have recovered from such shocking news so quickly. She was putting on a show. But for whom? For G.W., no doubt. She knew the old man had a bad heart. Everybody was aware of the fact that G.W.’s doctor had warned him to change the bad habits of a lifetime before he had a severe heart attack. I suppose it’s possible, even probable, that she loves her grandfather enough to do whatever is necessary to make him believe she isn’t completely falling apart. I suppose that’s well and good. After all, I can’t have G.W. dying on me. Not yet anyway.

  My plan for Leslie Anne’s death to look like a suicide is a good one. Too good to abandon just because she decided she can bluff her way through this traumatic experience. I need to remind her of who she is, of the evil flowing through her veins. And I should make her realize that it’s only a matter of time before her ugly little secret is out and everyone will know she’s Eddie Jay Nealy’s daughter.

  As a matter of fact, perhaps I need to figure out a way to let those nearest and dearest to the family learn about Tessa’s pitifully sordid past. And I need to do this while Tessa is out of town.

  Hmm. What’s the best way to go about this? A phone call, using the same device to disguise my voice that I used this morning when I taunted a sleeping Leslie Anne? Oh, it had been so easy to enter and exit her suite through the sitting room without anyone noticing. And if anyone had seen me, so what? Who wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told them I was concerned about Leslie Anne and wanted to check on her?

  DEANETTA KNIGHT lived a few miles outside of town in an old turn-of-the-century house that had been renovated, added on to and bricked sometime in the recent past. She met them on the porch, asked to see some identification, then invited them into her living room. The old woman walked with the aid of a cane, making her movements slow and slightly unsteady. Tessa guessed her age to be at least seventy, maybe seventy-five.

  Deanetta looked back and forth from Dante to Tessa, her milky brown eyes studying them, obviously trying to discern their honesty. “Tug said I could trust y’all not to involve me if anything gets stirred up because of what I’m gonna tell y’all.”

  “That’s right,” Dante said.

  “Swear it to me.” Deanetta focused on Tessa.

  “We swear, don’t we, Dante?” Tessa said.

  Dante nodded.

  “You’re that Westbrook gal, ain’t you?” Deanetta looked Tessa over, from head to toe. “I never seen you up close back then. Once your daddy showed up at the hospital, they posted a private duty nurse in your ICU room. Never heard of such a thing. That’s how everybody knew your daddy was somebody important.”

  “Mrs. Knight, I thought you worked at the Maitland Funeral Home at the time,” Dante said. “How do you know what went on at the hospital?”

  “My sister Flossie was an LPN who worked the night shift at the hospital back then. She’s dead and gone these past five years.” Deanetta sighed heavily. “Me and Flossie talked about it, you know, but when there was never no mention of it in the papers or nothing, and Mr. Maitland warned everybody who worked at the funeral home to never say a word about it, we figured it was best to keep our mouths shut. We didn’t want no trouble.”

  “Tug said Aaron Maitland performed an autopsy on a young woman whose body was found out on Interstate 20 and he implied there was a connection between this woman and Tessa Westbrook. Is that what you’re talking about? Is that what Mr. Maitland warned his employees to never talk about?” Dante asked.

  “There was a connection.” Deanetta studied Tessa again. “Two young gals, both blond, both raped and beaten and dumped out on the side of the road. The same thing was done to both of them gals. Awful things. Just awful.”

  Tessa’s heart stopped for a split second. Snapping her head around, she looked at Dante. He’d gone still as a statue, his face without expression. But she knew what he was thinking—the same thing she was. That second girl, the other blonde who hadn’t survived, had been Amy Smith. But why the cover-up? Had her father made certain that what had happened to the other girl was kept secret, too? But why?

  Deanetta stared sympathetically at Tessa. “You poor little thing you. How you lived through that is beyond me. Flossie told me that the folks working in the emergency room when you was brought in said you was nothing but a broken, bloody mess.”

  “I really don’t remember.” Tessa tried her level best not to picture herself as she must have looked when she’d been brought to the E.R. She barely remembered those days, when she’d been unable to think straight and had been totally helpless. Thank God her daddy had shown up so quickly and had made sure she received the best care money could buy.

  “Yeah, Flossie heard you had amnesia and we agreed it was a blessing you couldn’t remember nothing about what happened to you.”

  Dante’s gaze met Tessa’s. She wanted to reach out, grab him and hold him close. He had to be dying inside, halfway hoping he could lay Amy Smith to rest once and for all and yet maybe praying that the other blond girl Deanetta had told them about hadn’t been his Amy.

  “What happened to the other girl?” Dante asked. “What did the funeral home do with her body? Was it sent to the state—”

  Deanetta lowered her voice as if she thought the walls had ears. “After the autopsy, her body was held for identification. You see, her body was found first, that is her body was found before they found you, Ms. Westbrook. And your daddy came to Rayville to take a look at the other girl because she fit your description. That was about five or six days after her body was found, best I can recall.”

  “Oh, poor Daddy. He must have been so relieved that it wasn’t me.” Tessa reached over and grasped Dante’s hand, wanting to comfort him. God, how she wished that Dante’s Amy had su
rvived, too. “When Daddy told the sheriff that the girl wasn’t me, what happened then?”

  “To the girl’s body?”

  “Yes,” Tessa replied.

  “Well, strange thing was, the very next day you was found and brought to the hospital in the same shape that other poor gal had been in, except you was alive. Just barely. And the sheriff got hold of your daddy before he left town and he rushed right over to the hospital and saw that you was his little girl. Flossie said she saw him that day and he was a crying something awful. Right after that, Mr. Maitland sent the other girl’s body off to be cremated.”

  Dante tensed. “Who ordered her cremation?”

  “I ain’t got no idea. But afterward was when Mr. Maitland told me and the others who knew about the girl to never tell a soul, that there was some sort of criminal investigation going on that would trap the man who’d killed her and nearly killed the Westbrook girl.”

  “What sort of criminal investigation?” Tessa asked.

  “Don’t know. That’s all we was ever told.”

  Dante jerked his hand out of Tessa’s grasp as he faced Deanetta. “What happened to the other girl’s ashes?”

  “That was something plum peculiar, you know. Don’t reckon she had no kin folks. Nobody ever claimed her ashes, but somebody paid for a plot over in the cemetery and I went with Mr. Maitland the day they buried the urn with that poor little gal’s ashes in it. Weren’t nobody there except Mr. Maitland, me and Reverend Allsboro. And the grave digger, of course.”

  “Where’s the cemetery?” Tessa asked.

  “You want to go by and pay your respects?” Deanetta asked. “I guess it’s only fitting, ’cause except by the grace of God, it could have been you who died and not her.”

  DANTE HADN’T said a word. Except for the fact she could see his chest rising and falling, Tessa wouldn’t have been sure he was even breathing. Once Deanetta gave them directions to the cemetery, they’d left her house hurriedly. After he’d thanked the old woman for the information, Dante had all but run outside and straight to the car. Tessa had lingered only long enough to hug Deanetta.

  “The other girl, the one who died…” Tessa had said. “We—we think she might have been Dante’s fiancée. They were engaged when they were teenagers.”

  “Mercy to goodness!” Deanetta had held Tessa’s hands tightly and looked deeply into her eyes. “You go help him say goodbye to her. And then you show him he’s still alive.”

  The old woman’s words repeated themselves over and over in Tessa’s mind. She might be able to help Dante say goodbye to Amy Smith, if that was his intention. But she suspected it might be impossible to convince him to let Amy go.

  Dante parked the rental car alongside the road, then got out and headed toward the cemetery. Tessa opened the door and stood by the car for several minutes, watching Dante as he walked among the headstones. He was so obsessed with finding Amy’s grave that he’d all but forgotten Tessa.

  “Look for the pink marble monument,” Deanetta had said. “Only one like it in the whole cemetery.”

  She shouldn’t let him do this alone. But did she have the courage to stand at his side and give him whatever support and comfort she could while he mourned for another woman? How could she be so jealous of Amy Smith when the poor girl wasn’t even alive? Because Dante had loved Amy. Because he still loved her.

  As her gaze kept pace with Dante’s every move, she cried out quietly when he stopped and stared down at a small, pink marble monument. The afternoon sun hung midhorizon, its light hitting the row of pine trees lining the far side of the graveyard. Shadows cast by the tall, skinny pines flickered about on the ground, across the pink marble and over Dante’s stoic face.

  All thought for herself evaporated as loving concern for Dante filled her heart, and Tessa rushed across the cemetery. He needed her. Even if he didn’t know he did. He was all alone, facing his worst fears, forced to accept the bitter truth. Although they had no proof that the other young, blond woman who’d been dumped out on the highway a week before Tessa was found had actually been Amy Smith, the odds were that she had been Dante’s missing fiancée. Tessa only suspected that the date the girl had been found was close to the same time Amy had disappeared. If her suspicions were right, then Dante would have no choice but to accept the facts. Undoubtedly Nealy had dumped Amy’s body, then kidnapped Tessa almost immediately afterward.

  When Tessa came up behind Dante, he didn’t even hear her. And when she placed her hand on his shoulder, he didn’t flinch, although she felt his muscles tense.

  “There’s no name on the monument and the only date is the year,” Dante said, his voice amazingly calm. Too calm.

  Tessa took a good look at the monument. Pink marble, exquisitely carved, with the verse of a poem about the deceased living on in the gentle breeze, the morning sun, the soft rain, spanned the distance between two marble roses that graced either side of the headstone. No name. The only date, the year. Seventeen years ago.

  There was no doubt in Tessa’s mind who had paid for this young woman’s cremation and her expensive monument. But why? Had her father been overcome with pity for the girl who had no family to claim her body and gratitude that it had been she and not his own daughter who had died? What other explanation could there be?

  “It might not be Amy,” Dante said.

  Tessa squeezed his shoulder. “It might not be.”

  “You think it is, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s highly probable. And so do you.”

  Tessa felt a slight tremor rippling through Dante. Oh, God, help him. And help me to say and do all the right things, to give him whatever he needs to get through this ordeal.

  “It’s my fault she’s dead,” Dante said.

  Moving closer to his side, Tessa slipped her arm around his waist. “You’re talking nonsense. It’s not your fault. Eddie Jay Nealy preyed on young women. He’s the one responsible for Amy’s death, not you.”

  Dante trembled again. “She was waiting for me and I was late that night. I always picked her up after work so we could have a little time together. But I had a flat tire that night and when I got to the Dairy Dip, she wasn’t there. I—I found the engagement ring I’d given her on the sidewalk, along with the chain she kept it on around her neck.”

  Tessa hugged up closer and closer to Dante, wishing she had the ability to absorb some of his pain. He was reliving the night he’d lost Amy, the night his world had come crashing down around him. In his own way, Dante had suffered unbearably, just as she had. Dante and she and Amy were all Eddie Jay Nealy’s victims.

  I refuse to allow that evil man to win. I rebuilt my life from the ashes of a broken body, a mind void of memories and a crushed spirit. If I did that, why can’t Dante find the strength to accept what he cannot change, then move on and find love again?

  Selfishly, Tessa wished that Dante could love her. Not as he’d loved Amy. Young love, first love could never be equaled, never be repeated. But if he could open his heart to the possibility of loving someone else, maybe she could be that someone.

  But what about Leslie Anne?

  Dante accepting Amy’s death was only one of many hurdles they would have to overcome if there was any hope of them having a future together. Would Dante ever be able to forget that Tessa’s daughter had been fathered by the monster who had killed Amy?

  Tessa sighed softly as her dream of loving and being loved by Dante vanished like the phantom wish it had been. She and Dante had no future together, nothing beyond a fleeting moment in time. But surely fate had brought them together for a purpose.

  Yes, of course, Tessa thought. Dante and I are destined to help each other. He has come to me not only for Leslie Anne’s sake, but to show me that I can feel passion. And I’m with him, here and now, because he needs me.

  “Have you blamed yourself all these years?” Tessa asked, knowing full well that he had.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dante said. “I know it’s not logical. Fate conspired
against Amy and me from the very beginning. I was a real bad boy and she was such a good girl. People warned her to steer clear of me and they were right to warn her. I went after her because I wanted to prove I could have her, but boy did I get the shock of my life. I fell for her like a ton of bricks. I was so crazy in love with her I couldn’t see straight. And the funny thing is, she felt the same way about me.”

  Dante stared directly at Tessa, but she realized he was looking straight through and seeing a ghost from his past. How would it feel, she wondered, to love and be loved that way?

  “Any other night, I’d have gotten to the Dairy Dip on time,” Dante said, “and Eddie Jay Nealy would never have gotten his hands on her.”

  Dante clenched his teeth, balled his hands into fists and groaned. Tessa held on to him as he quivered from head to toe, shaking with the force of his barely suppressed emotions.

  “Oh, God, Dante, don’t,” she pleaded. “Stop thinking about what he did to her. It all happened so long ago. Please, darling, please, don’t think about it. I can’t bear to see you in so much pain.”

  Jerking with emotion, agony ripping through him so fiercely that Tessa could practically see the slash marks on his body, Dante dropped to his knees before the pink marble headstone. He dragged Tessa down with him because she refused to release her tenacious hold on him. Together, both on their knees, they faced Amy Smith’s monument.

  “Deep down I’ve known for years what happened to her, but I held on to the hope that I was wrong, that somehow, someway—” He leaned over and beat the ground, his fists pounding repeatedly. “God damn son of a bitch!” He kept repeating those words over and over again as he continued clubbing his fists against the hard ground. Finally he crumpled over, holding his bloody hands between his knees.

  Tessa wrapped her arms around him and held him. For what seemed like an eternity, she didn’t say anything, didn’t move, barely breathed. Dante’s body shook uncontrollably. But he didn’t cry.

  “Don’t hold it in any longer,” Tessa said. “Let it go. Release it.”