Wrongfully Accused

by Ana Barrons

  “I am well aware of that.”

  “Have you been drinking, Mrs. Franklin?” Parker asked.

  “No.”

  “She gets like this when she’s stressed out,” Gabe offered.

  “Only when you’re around,” she said.

  “Tell us what really happened the day your first husband died.”

  Gabe snapped his head up and met Mancuso’s triumphant gaze.

  “Steve?” Kate said. “What does that have to—” She turned to Gabe. “What have you been telling them?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Who, then?”

  “There have been reports that you drove your first husband to crash his car.” Mancuso was doing a rotten job hiding a smirk. “Either as a suicide or in some kind of rage.”

  “That’s hearsay, Agent,” Gabe said, his voice harsh. “She was never a suspect in my brother’s death. It was declared an accident.”

  She glanced between the two agents. “Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” Parker said. “We’re simply—”

  “Then I’d like you to leave.” She stood. “Now.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Mancuso said.

  “No, I made a mistake by talking to you at all. From now on if you want to interrogate me you can go through my attorney.” She strode through the living room and into the foyer, then held the door open for them. They nodded to her and left.

  Gabe stood in the archway to the living room, arms crossed over his chest. God help him, the last thing he wanted to talk about with any of them was his brother’s death.

  Kate turned to him, her expression stony. “Get out of my house.”

  “Not quite yet,” he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kate raised her chin. Her face was pale, no doubt a combination of fear and the pain in her head. “Like hell,” she said. “I don’t want you here, you bastard.”

  Gabe felt every bit as wrung out as she looked. “The reporters can pick up everything you’re saying.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Close the door, Kate.”

  She glared at him, then slammed the door shut. “Don’t even think about touching me.”

  “For the record,” he said, “the only person in the department I confided in after Steve’s death was Scott. He was my partner before I made detective. And it was years before I ever said a word to him.”

  She crossed her arms. “What did that agent mean about ‘some kind of rage’?”

  “He’s speculating.”

  “Oh? And what about you? What do you think happened? Do you think we had a fight or—”

  “No.” Gabe took a deep breath and let it out. He’d put off having this conversation for eight years. “I think it had to do with what happened between you and me.”

  She stared at him. “Wait a minute,” she said slowly. “Are you talking about that night? The one you’ve forbidden me to mention?”

  And jumped her bones to make his point. “Yes, damn it.”

  “I never told Steve about that.”

  Gabe didn’t move or take his eyes off her. “Well I sure as hell didn’t.”

  She frowned. “What’s your point, then?”

  “Did you tell anyone else?” he asked.

  “What? No!”

  “Not even Alison?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “So how did Steve find out?”

  She stopped moving, her face suddenly pale. “He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She splayed her fingers on her chest. “I would never have hurt him like that. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do.”

  “You left him,” Gabe said. He swallowed, knowing he’d been every bit as culpable as she had been. “That hurt him.”

  Kate stared at him, then said carefully, “You knew exactly why I left him. You of all people knew.”

  Yeah, he knew. Less than a week after that night, his mother had called him while he was working. She’d been agitated, worried about Steven’s state of mind. She told him Kate had moved out of the apartment and Steven was a basket case. Gabe still remembered the overwhelming guilt he’d felt. They all knew Steve was fragile emotionally. As far as the family was concerned Kate was Steven’s guardian angel, put on earth to love and protect him and keep him safe. Gabe had gone and made love to her and she’d left Steven. Great. But, coward that he was, he hadn’t called his brother or gone to see him. In fact, he’d had as little contact as possible with Steven after that night, right up until the day he died.

  “So why did you get back together three weeks later?” he asked.

  Kate hesitated, looked away. “He begged me to come back,” she said with a half shrug. “He’d already put the sale of his business in motion. He promised we’d spend more time together, that he wouldn’t be so distracted all the time.” She swallowed. “That’s the reason I gave him for leaving, that he was too absorbed in his work. So he upped and sold his business, just like that.” She finished with a snap of her fingers.

  “You didn’t push him to sell?” Gabe asked, hearing the accusation in his own voice. Kate shook her head no.

  “I told him not to sell it for my sake. I knew how into that business he was. Everybody did. I said we didn’t want the same things and it was best not live together anymore, but...” She trailed off, then lifted her hands. “He cried, he begged. He told me he couldn’t live without me.”

  “Still doesn’t explain why you married him,” Gabe said. “You could have kept seeing him, spent time with him and eased out of the relationship. You didn’t have to marry him.”

  “I know that.”

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “So, why did you marry him?”

  She and Steve had surprised everybody—especially Gabe—by getting married three months after that night in his apartment, two months after Kate went back to Steve. They’d only been apart for three weeks, but according to his mother, Kate had already found herself an apartment. Then suddenly, boom. She and Steven were living together again, and announced that they were getting married.

  The pain he’d felt at that announcement had been white-hot.

  Kate frowned. “Why ask? You assume I married him for the money, so why bother asking me? You assume I pushed him to sell the business in return for getting back together, and that I somehow contrived to get him to go smash his car into a tree so I’d have it all to myself. Right? Isn’t that your brilliant assumption?”

  Gabe didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he could.

  They were silent for a long moment, and then Kate chuckled, joylessly. “So, Steve being Steve, he sells his business and goes right out and buys himself a Porsche and a Maserati. Then he spends all his time driving them, washing them, talking to other Porsche and Maserati owners online. In our time together,” she said, making quotes with her fingers, “he talked incessantly about cars, about becoming a race car driver, going to rallies all over the world. Showing me photos of race cars on the web. I thought I’d go crazy.”

  She went to a small table in the foyer and mindlessly straightened photographs. “It didn’t have to be computers with Steve. It just had to be something he could lose himself in. Computers, cars, who knows what would have been next?” She turned to Gabe. “Why is it so hard to accept that he was racing around in that damn Maserati and crashed it by accident? Why do you insist on believing I had something to do with it?”

  Anger surged through Gabe, and the words he’d never spoken spilled from between his clenched teeth. “Because he called me from his damn Maserati, that’s why. Because he told me you should have married me, not him. Why did he say that?”

  She went still. “He actually said that?”

  “Yes, goddamn it.”

  She held on to the edge of the table and gazed into near space, as though remembering something from long ago. Her anger was gone, along with any remaining trace of color in her face. Eve
n her lips looked bloodless. “What words did he use?”

  “What difference does it make?” As though he couldn’t remember. As though Steve’s words weren’t permanently etched into his brain. They had come at him out of nowhere. No greeting.

  Nothing but those words...

  “I need to know,” she said. “It’s important.”

  “Fine.” The cat was out of the bag now, there was no sense trying to hide anything anymore. “He said, ‘You’re the one who should have married her, you bastard.’ That’s it. That’s all he said.”

  Kate gasped and put her hand to her mouth. Tears sprang to her eyes and her face crumbled. She stumbled away from the table and walked to the wall, then leaned her forehead against it. Gabe looked away, unwilling to witness her grief or her guilt or whatever it was. He’d seen those emotions too many times in his own mirror.

  They were silent for a long time, and then Kate said in a voice rough with tears, “So, the reason you’ve hated me all these years is that you assumed I told him we’d slept together.”

  Gabe didn’t answer, or look at her.

  “If only he’d told me what he was feeling, I could have kept him from getting into that car,” she said. “I wish to God I’d known.”

  When he turned she was still braced against the wall as though she would fall down if she let go.

  “If you didn’t tell him about that night, why did he say that to me?” Gabe demanded, his chest aching. “Did you tell him you didn’t love him? You knew how he was. You knew he could go over the edge with the right provocation.”

  “Of course I didn’t tell him that,” she said, sniffling. “I did love Steve. I always loved him, but...”

  “But what?”

  “I told you that night what it was like between us. I took care of him. He needed me, I liked being needed. You all counted on that. But it was never passionate between us.”

  Gabe winced. He’d never felt so intensely passionate about a woman as he had about her. “So, then, what?” he said. “You told him you weren’t sexually satisfied?”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  He stared at her. “Then why the hell did you marry him, two months after... Why didn’t you just keep things the way they were?” Fury exploded inside his chest, as it had all those years ago. “What you’re telling me doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”

  She whirled on him, her face flushed. “Oh, and it makes more sense to believe I wanted him to die so I could inherit his money?” she shouted back. “I didn’t give a damn about his money. If that was what I wanted I wouldn’t have tried to give it to your mother. Or did you conveniently forget about that?”

  He hadn’t forgotten, but the idea of taking Steve’s money had felt repugnant to all of them at the time. “My mother couldn’t take his money. None of us could. It wouldn’t have felt right.”

  “I understood that. Your mother said Steve would have wanted me to have it, that I was young and had my whole life ahead of me.” Kate moved to the staircase, grabbed the banister and lowered herself to a carpeted step. She hugged herself. When she spoke her voice was ragged and she shook her head slowly back and forth. “How could you ever in a million years imagine that I’d want Steve dead? That I’d marry him and then deliberately hurt him so he’d crash his car? That’s just crazy, Gabe. Jesus Christ.”

  Gabe pounded his fist against the wall beside him. “Then, damn it, why did he call me? Why did he tell me I should have married you, and then crash his car into a tree? Something must have happened. What the hell was it?”

  She was silent, tears running down her cheeks. Gabe waited, breathing heavily from shouting. “Okay, you win,” she said finally. “Something did happen.”

  He sucked in a breath. “What?”

  “I told him I was pregnant.”

  He fell back a step, unable to process her words. “You...what? You were pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you—?”

  “Yes. That’s why I married him. Happy now?”

  No, he wasn’t happy. Not at all. “But, what happened? Did you...?”

  “No,” she said. “I did not have an abortion. I miscarried the night after the funeral.”

  Gabe rested a hand on the wall to stop the dizziness. “But you just said... You and Steve—”

  “I know what I said.”

  He swallowed. “How far along were you?”

  Kate held his gaze for a long moment, then lowered her head and clasped her hands between her knees. Tears dripped off her nose and she brushed them away. “So, it looks like you were right all along. It was my fault. I thought he’d be happy, or at least happy enough. He barely reacted when I told him, just went back to his computer. I didn’t expect him to... He didn’t pay attention to when my periods came, or...” She trailed off on a sniffle and covered her face with her hands.

  Gabe’s gut was ice-cold. He’d been so desperate to get inside her that night he hadn’t used a condom. Was it possible? Could he have gotten her pregnant?

  It wasn’t hard to do the math.

  It came back to him then. All the phone calls he hadn’t answered... The emails begging to talk to him, that it was very important... He’d erased everything, as though by doing so he could erase the memory of their lovemaking, of the feelings he could no longer deny. The guilt had been as overwhelming as his desire for her, and he’d known he had to stay away from her or lose his fucking mind.

  As he stood frozen, Kate rose, her legs wobbly, her shoulders hunched, her expression impossibly sad. She turned her back to him and trudged up the steps, clutching the banister.

  “Kate,” he called to her. “Wait.”

  She kept climbing. “Get out of my house,” she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The sun was going down when Kate opened the door to her accountant, Edward Lowell, who stood on the porch with a pained look on his face. As usual, Bruno was being obnoxious. “Hello, Ed,” she said, pulling the dog aside by his collar. “Come on in.”

  He stepped inside without a word until she closed the door behind him. “I don’t know how this happened,” he said.

  “It’s true, then?”

  He nodded his balding head. “Believe me, I thought at first it was a mistake, but I spent most of the day with his accountant, and then I double-checked and double-checked again, and your assets are gone. Your accounts are empty.” He followed her into the living room and sank into a chair. “God, I’m sorry, Kate. I had no idea.”

  She perched across from him on the sofa. “Where do you think it went?”

  “My best guess is offshore someplace.”

  She took a deep shaky breath. “When did he do this?”

  “He did it gradually over the past year. Then, about three weeks ago, the withdrawals got bigger and bigger. Until it was all gone.”

  “What about life insurance?”

  He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “He was single when he met you, of course, and he...he never changed the beneficiary from his parents’ names to yours.”

  Good God. He hadn’t loved her enough to take care of that one small detail. Then again... “Well, he probably figured his parents could use the money more than I could if anything happened to him.”

  Ed nodded but didn’t meet her gaze.

  “So all that’s left is the real estate, I suppose. Unless there are more stocks.”

  “No stocks left, I’m afraid,” Ed said. “He sold off most of it over the past month.”

  Kate felt sick to her stomach. “We owned this house and the beach house jointly. He couldn’t have sold those out from under me.”

  “Well...no. But he was carrying a huge line of credit on both houses, which depleted your equity.”

  “How the hell did he get a line of credit without my—?” Then she remembered. “Oh, that’s right. He did manage to get my signature.”

  Ed opened a manila folder and flipped through the stack of documents. “Do you recall any of the do
cuments you signed recently?”

  She thought back. “I do remember some that had to do with property. He said we were refinancing the loans.”

  Ed looked sad. “So you didn’t examine them closely.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. How could she have been such a fool? “No. I never did. He was the lawyer. I figured whatever he was having me sign was legit. It never occurred to me to question him.”

  “I’ve seen this type of thing happen before,” Ed said. “But never to this extent.”

  She raised her eyes to his. “So where does this leave me? What do I have?”

  “This house, although it’s mortgaged to the hilt. Your car is paid off, and there’s your furniture and personal belongings. Your husband’s government pension, of course. I don’t know the amount yet, but it should be enough to make ends meet, at least for a while. Less than a hundred thousand a year, I imagine.”

  Ed set his glasses down on the table and leaned closer. “There are millions invested for your charities, Kate. Just say the word and I can start the paperwork to move that money back to you.”

  She had expected this. “Those people have nothing, Ed. The veterans are disabled, and will be for the rest of their lives. Our country used them and threw them away. I can’t take more away from them. And the kids in Peru?” She lifted her arms in a shrug. “Come on. Those tutoring centers are all that stand between them spending their childhoods making bricks beside their parents and learning to read.”

  “But—”

  “I won’t take that away from them. From any of them.”

  Ed sighed. “Then you’ll have to move. You can’t afford to keep up the mortgage on this house, unless you find a job that pays very, very well. And to be frank, at the moment I’m not sure...”

  He didn’t have to finish his sentence. As an unofficial suspect in her husband’s death, the headhunters wouldn’t exactly be pounding on her door. “I’m sure I can find something. If not here, then someplace else.”

  “I’m so sorry, Kate.”

  “This makes no sense.”

  “No, of course it doesn’t. Did your husband have gambling debts? Anything like that?”