by Lind Howard
“Even Loyal is on computer now,” Lucinda said, smiling. “The bloodlines are thoroughly cross-referenced, and his files include breeding times, results, medical history, and identification tattoos. He’d as proud of the system as he would be if it had four legs and neighed.”
He glanced at Roanna. “Do you still ride as much as before?”
“There isn’t time.”
“You’ll have more time now.”
She hadn’t thought of this benefit to Webb’s return, and her heart gave an excited leap. She missed the horses with painful intensity, but her statement had been the flat truth: there simply hadn’t been time. She rode when she could, which was enough to keep her muscles accustomed to the exercise, but not nearly enough to satisfy her. For now she had to devote herself to the intricacies of handing over the reins to Webb, but soon—soon!—she would be able to begin helping Loyal again.
“If I know you,” Webb said lazily, “you’re already planning to spend your days in the stable. Don’t think you’re going to dump everything in my lap and play hooky. I’ll have my hands full with all this and my Arizona properties too, so you’re still going to have to handle some of the work.”
Work with Webb? She hadn’t considered that he’d want her around, or that she would still be of any use. Her heart gave that little leap again at the prospect of being with him every day.
He concentrated then on studying the diagrams and analysis of stock performances and considering the projections. By the time Sage Whitten arrived, Webb knew exactly where they stood in the stock market.
Mr. Whitten had never met Webb before, but by his startled expression when he was introduced, he’d heard the gossip. If he was dismayed by Lucinda’s explanation that Webb would henceforth be handling all the Davenport concerns, he hid it well. But no matter what people suspected, Webb Tallant had never been charged with the murder of his wife, and business was business.
The meeting was concluded faster than usual. Scarcely had Mr. Whitten left than Lanette breezed into the study. “Aunt Lucinda, there’s a bag of some sort in the foyer. Did Mr. Whitten—?” She stopped dead, staring at Webb seated behind the desk.
“The bag belongs to me.” He scarcely glanced up from the computer, where he was reviewing the history of a stock’s dividends. “I’ll take it up later.”
Lanette’s cheeks were blanched, but she rallied with a forced laugh. “Webb! I didn’t know you’d arrived. No one told us you were expected today.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Oh. Well, welcome home.” Her tone was as false as her laugh. “I’ll tell Mama and Daddy. They’ve just finished breakfast, and I know they’ll want to welcome you themselves.”
Webb’s eyebrows lifted sardonically. “Is that so?”
“I’ll get them,” she said, and fled.
“About the bag.” Webb leaned back in the chair and swiveled so he was facing Lucinda, who was still on the sofa. “Where do I put it?”
“Wherever you want,” Lucinda firmly replied. “Your old suite has been completely redecorated. Corliss has taken it over, but if you want it she can move into another room.”
He rejected the offer with a slight shake of his head. “I suppose Gloria and Harlan have one of the other suites, and Lanette and Greg the fourth one.” He slanted an unreadable look at Roanna. “You, of course, are still in your old room on the back.”
He seemed to disapprove of that, but Roanna couldn’t imagine why. Left uncertain of what to say, she said nothing.
“And Brock has one of the regular bedrooms on the left side,” Lucinda said, confirming his supposition. “It isn’t a problem, though. I’ve been considering what can be done, and it would be a simple matter to connect two of the remaining bedrooms by opening a door between them, and converting one of the rooms into a sitting room. The remodeling could be done within a week.”
“That isn’t necessary. I’ll take one of the bedrooms on the back. The one next to Roanna will do fine. It still has a kingsize bed, doesn’t it?”
“All of the rooms have king beds now, except Roanna’s.”
He gave her a hooded look. “Don’t you like big beds?”
The motel bed where they’d made love had been a double. It should have been too small for the two of them, but when one person was lying on top of the other it reduced the need for space. Roanna barely controlled a blush. “I don’t need anything bigger.” She glanced at her watch and gratefully got to her feet when she saw the time. “I have to go to the county commissioner’s meeting, then I’m having lunch with the hospital administrator in Florence. I’ll be back by three.”
She leaned over to kiss the wrinkled cheek Lucinda presented to her. “Drive carefully,” Lucinda said, as she always did.
“I will.” There was an element of escape in her departure, and from the way Webb was looking at her, she was sure he’d noticed it as well.
After lunch, Webb and Lucinda returned to the study. He had endured Gloria and Harlan’s effusive, embarrassingly false welcomes, ignored Corliss’s sulky bad manners, and been fussed over by Tansy and Bessie. It was plain as hell that only Roanna and Lucinda had wanted him back; the rest of his family obviously wished he’d stayed in Arizona. The reason for that was pretty plain, too: they’d been mooching off Lucinda for years and were afraid he’d boot them out on their asses. It was a thought. Oh, not Gloria and Harlan. As much as he knew he’d dislike having them around, they were in their seventies, and the reasons he’d given Roanna ten years ago for their moving in were even more valid now. But as for the others …
He didn’t plan to do anything right away. He didn’t know the details of their individual situations, and it was a lot easier to get his facts straight before he acted than it would be to repair the damage done by a wrong decision.
“I suppose you want to have your say,” Lucinda said crisply, taking her seat on the sofa. “God knows you deserve it. This is your chance to get it off your chest, so go to it. I’ll sit here, listen, and keep my mouth shut.”
She was as indomitable as ever in spirit, he thought, but dangerously frail. When she’d hugged him, he’d felt the fragility of her brittle bones, seen the crepey thinness of her skin. Her color wasn’t good, and her energy level was low. He’d known, from his letters from Yvonne, that Lucinda’s health wasn’t good these days, but he hadn’t realized the imminence of her death. It was a matter of months; he doubted she would even see spring.
She’d been a cornerstone of his life. She had let him down when he’d needed her, but now she was willing to face his ire. It was a measure of her strength that he had tested his budding manhood against her, measured his growth by how well he held his own with her. Damn her, he wasn’t ready to let her go.
He hitched one hip onto the edge of the desk. “I’ll get to that,” he said evenly, then continued with soft violence: “But first I want to know what in hell y’all have done to Roanna.”
Lucinda sat in silence for a long time, Webb’s accusation hovering in the air between them. She stared out the window, looking out over the sweep of sundrenched land, dotted here and there with the shadows of the fat, fluffy clouds drifting overhead. Davenport land, as far as she could see. She had always taken comfort in this vista, and she still loved to see it, but now that her life was nearing an end she was finding other things of far more importance.
“I didn’t notice at first,” she finally said, her gaze still far away. “Jessie’s death was—well, we’ll talk about that later. I was so preoccupied with my own grief that I didn’t notice Roanna until she’d almost drifted away.”
“Drifted away, how?” His tone was hard, sharp.
“She nearly died,” Lucinda said baldly. Her chin trembled, and she sternly controlled it. “I’d always thought Jessie was the one who so desperately needed to be loved, to make up for her circumstances … I didn’t see that Roanna needed love even more, but she didn’t demand it the way Jessie did. Strange, isn’t it? I loved Jessie from the cradle, but
she would never have helped me the way Roanna has, or become as important to me. Roanna’s more than my right hand; these past few years, I couldn’t have managed without her.”
Webb waved all of that away, focusing on the one statement that had his attention. “How did she nearly die?” The thought of Roanna dying shocked him to the bone, and he felt a cold sense of dread when he remembered her guilty, miserable expression the day of Jessie’s funeral. She hadn’t tried to kill herself, had she?
“She stopped eating. She never ate much anyway, so I didn’t notice for a long time, almost too long. Everything was so disrupted, there were seldom any routine meals, and I suppose I thought she was snacking at odd hours the way we all were. She stayed in her room a lot, too. She didn’t do it deliberately,” Lucinda explained softly. “She just … lost interest. When you left, she totally withdrew. She blames herself for everything, you know.”
“Why?” Webb asked. Roanna had told him she hadn’t deliberately caused trouble, but maybe she really had, and confessed to Lucinda.
“It was a long time before she could talk about it, but several years ago she told me what happened in the kitchen, that she caught you by surprise when she impulsively kissed you. She didn’t know Jessie was coming down, and of course, it was just like Jessie to make a huge scene, but to Roanna’s way of thinking she caused all the trouble with that kiss. If she hadn’t kissed you, you and Jessie wouldn’t have argued, you wouldn’t have been blamed for Jessie’s death, and you wouldn’t have left town. With you gone …” Lucinda shook her head. “She’s always loved you so much. We laughed about it when she was little, thought it was hero worship and puppy love, but it wasn’t, was it?”
“I don’t know.” But he did, he thought. Roanna had never had any self-protection where he was concerned. Hell, she’d never been good at any kind of subterfuge. Her feelings had been right out in the open, her pride as totally vulnerable as her heart. Her adoration had always been there, like a piece of sunshine in his life, and he’d depended on its being there though he seldom paid much attention to it. Like the sunshine, it was something he’d taken for granted. That was why he’d been so damn mad when he thought she had betrayed him just to get back at Jessie.
Lucinda gave him a shrewd look that told him she wasn’t taken in by his denial. “After David and Karen died, you and I became the centerposts of Roanna’s life. She needed our love and support, but for the most part we didn’t give it to her. No, let me rephrase that, because most of the blame is mine: I didn’t give her my love and support. As long as you were here to love her, though, she got by. When you left, there was no one here for her, and she gave up. She was almost gone before I noticed,” Lucinda said sadly. A tear rolled down her wrinkled cheek, and she wiped it away. “She was down to eighty pounds. Eighty pounds! She’s five-seven; she should weigh at least a hundred and thirty. I can’t describe to you how pitiful she looked. But one day I saw her, really saw her, and realized that I had to do something or I’d lose her, too.”
Webb couldn’t say anything. He stood up and walked over to the window, his fists jammed deep into his pockets. His shoulders were rigid as he stood with his back to Lucinda, and it was hard for him to breathe. Waves of panic washed over him. My God, she’d almost died, and he hadn’t known anything about it.
“Just saying ߢYou need to eatߣ wouldn’t have done the trick,” Lucinda continued, the words spilling out of her as if she’d held them in for too long, and she had to share the pain. “She needed a reason for living, something to hold on to. So I told her I needed her help.”
She stopped and swallowed hard before resuming. “No one had ever said they needed her. I hadn’t realized … Anyway, I told her I couldn’t manage without her, that everything was too much for me to handle by myself. I didn’t realize how true that was,” Lucinda said wryly. “She pulled herself back. It was a long fight, and for a while I was terrified that I’d left it too late, but she did it. It was a year before her health recovered enough that she could go to college, a year before she stopped waking us up at night with her screams.”
“Screams?” Webb asked. “Nightmares?”
“About Jessie.” Lucinda’s voice was soft, shredded with pain. “She found her, you know. And that was the way she screamed, the same sound, as if she’d just walked in and—and stepped in Jessie’s blood.” The words trembled, then firmed as if Lucinda wouldn’t allow that weakness in herself. “The nightmares developed into insomnia, as if staying awake was the only way she could escape them. She still suffers from it, and some nights she doesn’t sleep at all. She catnaps, for the most part. If you see her dozing during the day, whatever you do, don’t wake her up because that’s probably the only sleep she’s had. I’ve made it a rule that no one wakes her, for any reason. Corliss is the only one who does. She’ll drop something or let a door slam, and she always pretends it’s an accident.”
Webb turned from the window. His eyes were like green frost. “She might do it once more, but that’ll be the last time,” he said flatly.
Lucinda gave a faint smile. “Good. I hate to say it of my own family, but Corliss has a mean, trashy streak in her. It’ll be good for Roanna, having you here again.”
But he hadn’t been here when she’d needed him most, Webb thought. He’d walked out, leaving her to face the horror, and the nightmares, alone. What was it Lucinda had said? Roanna had stepped in Jessie’s blood. He hadn’t known, hadn’t thought about the strain she must have been under. His wife had been murdered and he’d been accused of the crime; he’d been undergoing his own crisis, and he’d assigned her stress to guilt. He should have known better, because he’d been closer to Roanna than anyone else.
He remembered the way she had ignored the united condemnation of the town and slipped her little hand into his at Jessie’s funeral, to give him comfort and support. Considering the wild tales that had been going around about Jessie catching him screwing Roanna, it had taken a great deal of courage for her to approach him. But she’d done it, not counting the cost to her reputation, because she’d thought he needed her. Instead of squeezing her hand, doing any little thing at all to show his trust in her, he’d rebuffed her.
She’d been there for him, but he hadn’t be there for her.
She had survived, but at what cost?
“I didn’t recognize her at first,” he mused almost absently. His gaze never left Lucinda’s. “It isn’t just that she’s older. She’s all shut down inside.”
“That was how she coped. She’s stronger; I think it frightened her when she realized how weak and ill she had become. She’s never let herself get in that condition again. But she coped by shutting everything out, and holding herself in. It’s as if she’s afraid to feel too much, so she doesn’t let herself feel anything. I can’t reach her, and God knows I’ve tried, but that’s my fault, too.”
Lucinda squared her shoulders as if settling an old burden, one she had become so used to that she seldom noticed it now. “When she found Jessie and screamed, we all went running into the bedroom and found her standing over the body. Gloria jumped to the conclusion that Roanna had killed Jessie, and that’s what she and Harlan told the sheriff. Booley had a deputy guarding her while he checked it out. We were all on one side of the room, and Roanna was on the other, all by herself except for the deputy. I’ll never forget the way she looked at us, as if we had walked up and stabbed her. I should have gone to her, the way I should have gone to you, but I didn’t. She hasn’t called me Grandmother since,” Lucinda said softly. “I can’t reach her. She goes through the motions, but she doesn’t even care about Davencourt. When I told her I was going to change my will to benefit you, if she could get you to come home, she didn’t even blink. I wanted her to argue, to get angry, to care, but she doesn’t.” The incomprehensibility of it rang in Lucinda’s voice, for how could anyone not care about her beloved Davencourt?
Then she sighed. “Do you remember how she was always like a windup toy that never wound down
? Running up and down the stairs, banging doors, yelling … I swear, she had no sense of decorum at all. Well, now I’d give anything to see her skip, just once. She was always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and now she hardly talks at all. It’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking.”
“Does she laugh?” he asked in a rough tone. He missed her laughter, the infectious giggle when she was up to some mischief, the belly laughs when he told her jokes, the joyous chuckle as she watched foals romping in the pastures.
Lucinda’s eyes were sad. “No. She almost never smiles, and she doesn’t laugh at all. She hasn’t laughed in ten years.”
CHAPTER 13
Roanna glanced at her watch. The county commissioner’s meeting was taking longer than usual, and she would have to leave soon or be late for her lunch in Florence. The Davenports had no official authority in county matters, but it was almost traditional that a family representative attend the meetings. Davenport support, or lack of it, often meant life or death to county projects.
When Roanna had first begun attending the meetings in Luanda’s stead, she had been largely ignored, or at best treated to a figurative pat on the head. She had merely listened, and reported to Lucinda; to a large degree, that was still what she did. But Lucinda, when she had taken action on the matters that interested her, had made a point of saying, “Roanna thinks” or “Roanna’s impression was,” and soon the commissioners had realized that they had better pay attention to the solemn young woman who seldom spoke. Lucinda hadn’t lied; Roanna did relay her thoughts and impressions. She had always been observant but so active that she had often missed details, much as a speeder can see a highway sign but pass it too fast to read the message. Now Roanna was still and silent, and her brown eyes roamed from face to face, absorbing nuances of expression, tones, reactions. All of this went straight back to Lucinda, who then made her decisions based on Roanna’s impressions.
