But love required trust, and she had none to give.
Pops folded the newspaper and swatted it down on the table. “You don’t believe Ellie is guilty.”
Did he? Martha had thrown her teenage daughter out on the streets, knowing what her options would be for survival. Then, when Ellie not only survived but prospered, she’d hunted her down and threatened her. Ellie had had too much to drink, and those same survival instincts her mother had forced on her might have kicked in. Might have led her to drive home. Might have caused her to flee the accident scene. Might have blacked out the details of the accident.
Or she might be guilty of nothing more than wishing her mother dead.
Leaving the question unanswered, he asked one of his own. “What do you do, Pops, when you find out that everything a person’s ever told you is a lie?”
“What kind of lies? Big ones or little ones? Making excuses for things they’ve done or lying for their own benefit or covering things they’re ashamed of?”
Tommy shrugged. Ellie hadn’t made excuses. She’d done what she had to to survive, and she hadn’t benefitted, unless being treated as a regular person counted. But she was ashamed of the past, or she wouldn’t have created the fantasy life with fantasy parents.
Pops’s gaze narrowed, and after a moment, his mouth thinned. “Found out something about Ellie you’d rather not know, huh?”
He nodded. Hell, yeah, he preferred thinking that she’d had the fantasy life—a regular home, regular parents who loved her, nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t want to know that she’d been on her own, scared, hungry, homeless, desperate.
“Is this stuff she’s done since you met her?”
“No.”
“Does it change who you think she is?”
Tilting his head back, Tommy gazed into the branches of the tree overhead. There was just enough breeze to flutter the leaves, to make a soothing rustle that could, and often did on lazy afternoons with Pops, lull a person to sleep.
He’d always thought Ellie was beautiful. Nice. Sweet. Intelligent. Capable. Incredibly sexy. A little guarded. A little distant. Did he think any differently now?
“No. It doesn’t change anything.” Though now he could add strong and resilient and tough to the list.
“Does it change the way you feel about her?”
He hated that life had been so unfair. He was angry about what her parents and her so-called friend had done to her. It hurt that she’d had to learn so many ugly lessons all at once, and it hurt like hell knowing that she’d lived half her life unable to trust anyone with something as basic as her name.
“No,” he said quietly, regretfully. “I still love her. But now I understand why she…” Why she didn’t trust him enough to let herself love him back. Why she’d been so willing to give up everything and run away. Why she’d never wanted a commitment, not from him, not to him.
I wish to God you were dead, she’d said to Martha last night. It was fifteen years late in coming, but Martha had finally gotten what she deserved.
“Well?” Pops prodded. “You gonna sit here with an old man all day, or go try to make things right with that pretty girl of yours? You know, I’d like to hold my first great-grandbaby at least once before I die.”
Tommy didn’t bother pointing out to him that Ellie wasn’t his and really never had been. He didn’t tell Pops that the odds of them ever having kids were so damn slim that they were nonexistent. They had been from the beginning, but he’d let his hopes blind him.
Was he blinded now?
He knew the past she’d wanted so much to keep hidden. He knew Kiki was determined to make a case against her for Martha’s death. He knew she might conceivably be guilty—not of murder, but of hit-and-run. Of driving under the influence, bad judgment and impaired thinking. He knew she would never deliberately take another person’s life.
And nothing he knew changed the way he felt. None of it changed what he had to do.
Rising from the chair, he bent and hugged his grandfather. “I’ve got to go, Pops. I’ve got to see someone.”
Ellie. There was something he had to tell her.
It’s all right. We’ll deal with it.
Ellie pretended she didn’t know to the minute how long Tommy had been gone, but it was a lie. She’d watched television and talked with Robbie and Anamaria, but the entire time a clock had been ticking in her head: one minute, two, five, ten, thirty, sixty.
When a car pulled into the driveway and, a moment later, a door closed, she stiffened. One hundred eighty-eight minutes, give or take a few seconds. It had taken more than three hours for him to decide he could stomach facing her again.
His steps were quiet as he crossed the porch. There were two small thuds; then the door swung open and he came inside, carrying the suitcases and the canvas bags she’d stashed in her car the afternoon before. He set them in the hallway near Pops’s room, then stopped in the living room doorway. He didn’t look eager to talk to any of them.
“Help me up off this couch,” Anamaria said, extending her hand to Robbie. He got to his feet with the natural grace all Calloways shared—one of the perks of good breeding—took her hand and pulled her easily to her feet.
“I’ll call you later,” Robbie said as he passed Tommy on the way to the front door, squeezing his shoulder.
“I’ll call you later,” Anamaria said to Ellie before her husband tugged her around the corner.
An instant later, the door closed again, and suddenly the house seemed very small, very close. Ellie was already huddled in the armchair, her feet drawn up beside her, hugging a faded patchwork pillow. She tried to make herself a little smaller, a little less noticeable. As if any man could fail to notice a full-grown woman in his living room.
After a time, Tommy moved farther into the room. He picked up the remote and turned off the television, then hesitated, the length of the coffee table between them.
She should say something flippant, something light, as if a few hours ago she hadn’t confided her darkest secrets to him and he hadn’t run screaming in the other direction.
Okay, to be fair, they were her next-to-darkest secrets, and he hadn’t screamed. But he had certainly run. She’d done it enough in her lifetime to recognize it.
He shifted his weight side to side, shoved both hands into his hip pockets, then asked, “Did you tell Robbie…?”
He couldn’t even say it. That Martha was your mother, that you were a prostitute, you were in and out of jail, you were homeless, worthless, a nobody? And she didn’t say it, either. She simply nodded before asking her own question. “Did you tell Kiki?” Her bags had been in the car, and Kiki had control over the car. He must have seen her, talked to her. Repeated Ellie’s secrets to her.
“Only the last part. That your name was Bethany and Martha was your mother. The rest…” He shrugged awkwardly.
Anamaria and Robbie had been sympathetic, understanding, insisting it made no difference, though Ellie wasn’t convinced. When someone told you something that shocked you, you murmured the appropriate words, but it was your behavior that told the truth. Maybe it really wouldn’t change the way they felt about her; maybe they would remain her friends, or maybe they wouldn’t. Only time would tell.
The truth had mattered to Tommy, and it would damn well matter to Kiki. It would give her a motive for murder once she found out the rest, which would happen sometime today, maybe tomorrow if Ellie was lucky, when they ran a criminal history on Bethany Ann Dempsey.
She’d dated a cop too long, she thought, choking back the hysterical urge to laugh. She’d picked up the terminology and knew the process undergone by suspects once they’d been arrested. If Kiki got her way, it was only a matter of time before she got to experience it firsthand instead of only in Tommy’s stories.
“So now they know I have a motive, to go along with the dented car and the blood on my clothes.” She swallowed hard. Robbie had been very positive and encouraging, and Anamaria couldn’t have
been more supportive. But Ellie wanted, needed to know the odds from someone who knew.
Her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be, and shakier, too. “Are they going to charge me?”
Tommy stiffened, and his gaze shifted away briefly before returning to her. “I’d say yes.”
His answer didn’t surprise her; she’d known it deep inside. She’d just hoped…and been disappointed. The reason she’d given up hoping fifteen years ago. “Did I do it? Did I run my mother down in the road?”
Finally he moved, coming to sit on the coffee table in front of her. The smell of his cologne was faint, having been applied hours ago, and a heavy growth of stubble darkened his jaw. He looked handsome, worn out and oh, so serious. “If you did, it was an accident. It was late, dark. She was wearing dark clothes. She’d been drinking. She was probably weaving down the middle of the street.”
It was a picture she could envision too easily. Because she’d actually seen it? The possibility made her shudder.
“I don’t believe—” He broke off abruptly, staring hard at her, then slowly, thoughtfully repeated the words. “I don’t believe you did it. Accident or not. Drunk or not. I don’t believe you could get so drunk that you could run over a woman in the street, get out of the car, go to her and not realize what you’d done.”
“Alcoholics have blackouts all the time,” she whispered, stunned that he sounded so sure when she didn’t have a clue.
“You’re not an alcoholic. If you got so drunk that you couldn’t remember a damn thing all night long, would you have been able to leave the restaurant without being seen, get in your car and drive across town, run over Martha, then drive back across town and reenter the restaurant, again without being seen?”
“Do you know for sure that no one saw me leave or come back?”
“Decker told me when I picked up your stuff. They’ve interviewed the kitchen staff and were starting on the waiters.”
Leaving unnoticed through the kitchen during business hours would be close to impossible. She always spoke to the staff when she went into the kitchen; they expected it. And they were never overly busy the night of the Halloween festival—enough to make staying open profitable, not enough to keep the staff from noticing their boss walking through their workspace.
But she could have gone out the front door. They would have assumed she was returning to the booth, so no one would have watched to see her circle the building and enter the parking lot from the alley. All the while so intoxicated that she didn’t know what she was doing. And why would she have headed to the house? She’d already packed everything she wanted; she’d locked up the place and said goodbye that afternoon. There was no reason to go back
“Did they talk to Deryl, the bartender?”
“He said he served you one drink. A pumpkin-spice ale. Said you sat in the corner booth with a witch while you drank it, left right after she did, and he didn’t see you again. He didn’t recognize the witch’s voice, but he said it was a good costume with a real heavy makeup job.”
It was a scary thing, missing hours from her life, having other people know more about what she did during those hours than she did. It was even scarier having missing hours where no one knew what she’d done.
“What if I did it?” she whispered.
Tommy’s mouth thinned. “You didn’t.”
“But what if I did? Even if no one saw me leave the restaurant, apparently I did. My car was on the other side of town. It was used to kill Martha. How would it have gotten there if I didn’t drive it?”
“Someone else drove it.”
She would love to believe that she’d crashed on the office sofa as soon as the ale took effect and that someone had lifted her keys and helped himself to her car. But who? People didn’t just come into her office…though they could. She hadn’t locked the door since the time she and Tommy had made love in there on his lunch break last spring. Someone could have walked in, found her passed out and taken her keys, then brought them back.
“Who would want to kill Martha and make it look as if I did it?”
Tommy scowled, looking fierce in spite of his fatigue. “I doubt that anyone who knew her would regret that she’s dead.”
That was probably true. Ellie didn’t regret it, except for the fact that suspicion had been cast on her. She would say that made her a terrible daughter, but the last time she’d begged Martha to let her come home, her mother had called her a filthy whore. You’re no daughter of mine.
Blood couldn’t make up for years of neglect, bitterness and hatred.
“As for blaming you…every smart killer wants the blame to fall on somebody else. You’re an easy choice. Everyone in town who saw you with Martha knew there was something ugly between you.”
It was hard to be discreet when fear and disgust reeked from your very pores.
“Is there anyone Decker should be looking at?” Tommy asked. “Another relative, a friend, someone who might have come here with her, an enemy who might have followed her?”
“I’ve had no contact with her for almost half my life. She and my father were never close to their families. Her parents lived ten miles away, and I saw them maybe five times in fifteen years. She had a brother and two sisters, but we never saw them, either. I never even met their kids.”
Silence settled between them while he scrubbed his face with his palms, then got to his feet. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a cold bottle of water. He offered it, she shook her head and he twisted off the cap to gulp down half of it.
“She was blackmailing you, wasn’t she?”
Heat flushed Ellie, making her shift uncomfortably. “Yes. She wanted her name on the house and the business, to live with me and play the gracious hostess at the restaurant and spend my money.”
“Or she would tell…” He gestured, an oddly graceful motion considering that it was filling in for words he still couldn’t bring himself to say. “Did you really believe it would make a difference, Ellie? That anybody who knows you would care?”
You care, she wanted to remind him. She’d seen the shock, the revulsion. He couldn’t have gotten away from her quickly enough, and he was the one who’d said he loved her.
For the first fifteen years of her life, she’d been told and shown time and again that she was nothing. Her parents had had no use for her; her best friend had helped destroy her; customers had beaten her, stolen from her and debased her; people with normal lives had kept their distance from her as if being homeless and poor and a prostitute might be contagious.
She was deeply ashamed of who she had been and what she had done. Living like that had been too painful; part of her had just wanted to curl up somewhere and die.
And part of her had struggled like hell to put those years behind her, to make herself into a new person who was, on the surface, no different than anyone else. She’d worked hard to forget that Bethany Ann Dempsey had ever existed. She’d never wanted the person she’d become tainted by even the memory of who she’d once been.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “It makes a difference.”
“You’re wrong,” he replied just as flatly. “It was a hell of a thing for you to go through, but it doesn’t change anything. You’re still the same woman you were yesterday. You’re still the woman that people in this town know and like and respect.”
She shook her head. “Only because they don’t know yet. But it’ll come out, and it will matter.”
He stared at her a long time before grimly shaking his own head. “You don’t cut people any slack, do you, Ellie? And you don’t cut yourself any. You were in a bad situation, and you did what you had to to survive. If anyone holds that against you now, it’s their loss, not yours.”
He rubbed one hand over his face again. “I need to lie down. Promise me you won’t leave.”
He was asking for a promise from a woman who had lied to him from the first time they’d met. If she said she wouldn’t run away, he was willing to tru
st her and leave her free to do just that. The thought made a lump form in her throat. “I won’t,” she said, her voice hoarse.
With an accepting nod, he went to the hall, then turned back. “It’ll be okay, Ellie. We’ll make it so.”
For the first time in days, she felt a moment of overwhelming peace. It wouldn’t last long. Kiki would arrest her for Martha’s death, the gossip would start and life as she knew it would end.
But for this moment, she wasn’t alone. She felt safe. And even though she knew better, even though it always made the disappointment worse, for this moment she hoped.
Chapter 8
After a long, awkward evening, Tommy had been glad to get to bed. But even despite his nap that afternoon, morning came too soon. The beep of his alarm was followed a moment later by the sound of the shower coming on in the bathroom next door. He rolled onto his side and stared at the dim rectangle of light that was the window.
Of course Ellie was planning to go to work as if nothing had happened. If he’d thought about it, he would have been surprised by any other action on her part. But he hadn’t thought about it.
He forced himself out of bed and went into the kitchen for a bottle of water. Though he was up at five every day but Saturdays, he wasn’t a quick starter. It was sheer will that kept him moving most mornings, getting into his running clothes and shoes and setting off for the river trail and five miles to kick his brain into gear. There would be no run this morning, but no crawling back into bed, either, not unless he could persuade Ellie to go with him.
Now, there was a thought to get his blood pumping.
He’d showered and shaved the night before; by the time she came out of the bathroom, he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She gave him a tight smile on her way back to Pops’s room, closed the door, then came out again ten minutes later ready to leave.
“You don’t have to go in,” he said as he locked the front door behind them.
Passion to Die for Page 13
