Happily Never After
Happily Never After
Kathleen O'Brien
Members of the wedding party are starting to die.No one could believe that Thomas Beckham was the kind of man to leave a woman at the altar, but he couldn't marry his bride-to-be. Not after what he'd seen her do. His only choice was to leave and never look back–and to keep to himself everything he'd witnessed.After the wedding-that-wasn't, everyone, including Kelly Ralston, went on to other things. Or so it had always seemed. But ten years later, Kelly finds herself attending the funeral of another one of the bridesmaids–the third member of the wedding party to meet a tragic death. Kelly can't help but wonder if the deaths are a coincidence. Or are they linked? If so, who will be targeted next?Thomas Beckham may be her only chance to find the killer. Before the killer finds her…
“Tom? Are you there? It’s Kelly.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
Tom understood that something must have happened. Something bad. Kelly hadn’t called him in ten years, though at first he had deluded himself that she might.
“I don’t know if you heard about Lillith Griggs. I mean, she became Lillith Griggs—you knew she and Jacob got married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that.” He and Jacob still kept in touch, still wrote now and then, though of course, Jacob didn’t admit that to Lillith, who had, like Kelly, been one of Sophie’s bridesmaids and therefore subscribed to the official position that Tom Beckham was scum. “What about Lillith?”
“She was killed in a car accident. Three days ago.”
Tom hadn’t known Lillith well, but she’d always seemed much more…alive than most people. She was a beauty, a brain and a class clown all in one. What kind of accident had been potent enough to extinguish all that?
“I’m sorry to hear that. How is Jacob?”
“He’s a mess,” Kelly said. “That’s why I’m calling. The funeral is tomorrow and he hopes you can come. He needs a friend…and you seem to be the one he wants.”
It was subtle but he could hear how inexplicable she found that fact to be. “Okay,” he said.
“You’ll come?” She must have been expecting an argument.
“Yes. Tell him I’ll be there. What time is the funeral?”
“One. But Tom, if I tell him you’re coming, and then you…”
“Kelly, I’m telling you I will be there. Have I ever lied to you?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Not to me.”
Happily Never After
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
Sometimes, true love makes an appearance at the worst possible moment. When you’re too young, when you’re living on another continent, when you’re on opposite sides of a stormy issue. Or when you’re about to marry her best friend.
For Tom Beckham, the hero of Happily Never After, falling in love with Kelly was the dumbest thing he could do. Well, maybe the second-dumbest. The first was getting engaged to beautiful but troubled heiress Sophie Mellon.
The three glamorous Mellon siblings have always been clouded in a miasma of rumors. Their neighbors hear things they can’t quite understand—and don’t dare to repeat. But Tom, a young, ambitious lawyer, didn’t care. Sophie’s good looks and impressive mansion could help his career, and that was all that mattered.
Until he fell in love with her bridesmaid. Until ugly rumors became hideous truth. Until he left Sophie at the church, dressed in antique lace, her beautiful face streaming with tears.
He spent ten years trying to forget Kelly—and the terrible truth about the woman he almost married. But now members of the wedding party are starting to die. He’ll have to face all his old demons—including his love for Kelly—if he’s going to survive.
I have a special fondness for the “reunion” romance. I adore the thought that, like water seeking an outlet, true love can trickle through the years, overcoming the most daunting barriers, navigating the most amazing bends and turns. And then, somehow, find its way safely home. I hope you enjoy watching Tom and Kelly earn their second chance.
My next Harlequin Signature Select book, Quiet as the Grave, will also feature a couple who must endure years of separation. Thanks to my Firefly Glen readers who wrote asking for Mike and Suzie’s story, these two fascinating characters will finally find out whether puppy love has the strength to survive in the real—and very dangerous—adult world.
I love to hear from readers! Please visit my Web site at www.KathleenOBrien.net, or write me at P.O. Box 947633, Maitland, FL 32794.
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bonus Features
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEST VIEW of the tortured and beautiful Mellon house was from the top of the East River Bridge. In winter, when the elm trees had shivered themselves to skeletons, you could see everything, right down to the statue that had toppled over in the fern garden twenty years ago and had never been set right.
Mrs. Mellon must hate to see the sheltering leaves fall, Kelly Ralston thought as she turned right on Market and headed toward the bridge. The proud old woman would hate feeling so exposed. Coeur Volé had been built a hundred years ago, but even then it had been designed for privacy. And that was long before Sebastian’s accident, Mr. Mellon’s death or Sophie’s…
Long before tragedy knocked on the door of Coeur Volé and apparently moved in to stay.
Even so, Kelly—and probably half the population of Cathedral Cove—never crossed the bridge without slowing down to stare. She did it now, though it was a foggy autumn midnight, not winter, and she couldn’t realistically expect to see anything but shadows.
Lillith Griggs, whose restored Jaguar was right in front of Kelly’s, wasn’t slowing down, though. Lightning Lillith, as her husband teasingly called her, was infamous for collecting the most speeding tickets in Cathedral Cove. Of course, she was a lawyer, so she wiggled her way out of a lot of them.
Suddenly the cell phone tucked into Kelly’s cup holder vibrated noisily.
“Hey, I meant to ask you,” Lillith said without preamble. “Did you hear that Sophie’s checked herself out again?”
“No. Really? Is she back at home?” Kelly maneuvered onto the bridge, keeping close to her friend’s car. In an un-characteristic display of caution, Lillith had asked Kelly to follow her home from the bar where they’d had a late dinner. Lillith was ordinarily the most self-confident person Kelly had ever met. But she’d been getting weird phone calls, she said. And for the past few days, she’d had the feeling someone was following her.
Kelly had a horrible thought. “God, Lily. Are you saying you think Sophie’s been following you?”
“Well, no, probably not. Actually, I’m sorry I even mentioned that. I’m probably imagining it all.” Lillith laughed, and for the first time tonight she sounded like herself. “It’s probably just this spooky feeling of having another person living in my own body. Pregnancy is weird, if you really think about it.”
Kelly laughed, but kept both hands on the wheel. The East River Bridge was steep, and they were reaching the peak. “No, it’s not. It’s perfectly normal and wonderful. I can’t wait to hear what Jacob says when you tell him. Promise you’ll call me immediately.”
“I won’t have to. You’ll hear him all the way out to your studio, beating his breast and whooping like the darling dumb jock he is. He’ll be insufferable. He’ll act like his sperm has made a field goal from the fifty-yard line.”
“In a way, it has.” Kelly didn’t pay much attention to Lillith’s acerbic tone. The Griggses had been married six years, and they were silly in love. Kelly had always struggled with a little jealousy, not being very good at the marriage thing herself. And now that there was a Griggs baby on the way…
But just then Kelly caught her first glimpse of the strange, needlelike tower of Coeur Volé piercing the low-lying fog, and she remembered that she had a lot to be grateful for, after all. She might not be as happy as Lily Griggs, but at least she wasn’t cursed.
Her car crested the top of the bridge, just feet behind Lillith’s. Over the phone line she heard Lillith’s sudden intake of breath. “What the hell?”
“What?” Kelly asked, but then she saw it. The stained glass in the highest tower window was glowing. “It’s probably Sophie. She’s always had trouble sleeping, even as a teenager. And now that she spends so much time in institutions—”
She heard a low curse from Lillith’s end, and an ominous, repetitive thumping sound. “Damn it,” Lillith said harshly. “What’s wrong with this damn thing?”
“What?” But suddenly Kelly realized that Lillith’s gasp hadn’t been a reaction to the tower light. She probably hadn’t even seen it.
Something was wrong with Lillith’s car. She was taking the down slope of the bridge much too fast, even for Lightning Lillith. Fog shot from beneath her tires like jet contrails. Her taillights were pulling away, stretching the distance between their two cars.
At the foot of the bridge, hidden at the moment in a blanket of damp silver fog, the road made a sharp right-hand curve to avoid the first of the riverfront mansions. If Lillith didn’t slow down…
“Lily!” Kelly realized she was shouting into the cell phone. But Lillith’s car was still gathering speed, sucked down by gravity, going twice as fast now as Kelly’s. Kelly had to fight the instinct to hit the accelerator, to try to catch her. That would be madness. And yet, it was impossible to accept that there was nothing she could do.
“Lily, for God’s sake, slow down!”
“Damn it.” Lillith’s voice was tight and husky, as if her throat were raw. The thumping sound continued. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What’s happening?”
“The brakes.” And then Lillith’s voice seemed to come from a distance, and Kelly knew she’d dropped the cell phone. “Damn it, damn it. Catch, damn it. Why won’t—”
“Lily! The hand brake! Pull the hand brake!”
Was that the right advice? Kelly’s mind wasn’t working, didn’t have time to work. Maybe Lillith should turn the car in a circle, or try to use the median to interrupt the momentum—
The red sports car changed lanes, deliberately, Kelly thought. Then it clipped the guardrail of the bridge. Yellow and white sparks flew as the two metals kissed. It helped a little, but they were running out of time, running out of bridge. Kelly began to pray.
At the last minute, Lillith swerved, but it was too late. The car was still going much too fast. Though Kelly was now a hundred yards behind, she felt the shudder as Lillith’s car lifted off the asphalt, bumped over the curb, shot across the smooth green grass of an elegant lawn, and finally rammed headfirst into the scarred trunk of an ancient, unyielding oak.
The car seemed for a horrible instant to be trying to climb the tree, but of course it couldn’t be. The nose of the car collapsed like an accordion, and the air exploded with lightning bolts of broken glass.
And then everything was still.
Kelly slammed on her brakes and tumbled out of her car without even stopping to turn off the engine. She was trying to punch in 911 on her cell phone, but her fingers were like rubber, and she misdialed twice before she got through. She ran, but her legs were shaking so hard she twisted her ankle and had to hobble the last few yards.
“We need an ambulance. There’s been a terrible accident.”
“Where are you?”
She looked around. For a moment she couldn’t think where they were. It was so dark. Everything was foggy and silent, except for the hiss of something coming out of Lillith’s car.
“The bridge,” she managed to say. She stumbled over the curb and dropped the telephone. Somehow she found it again, just in time to hear the voice on the other end asking her which bridge.
Which bridge? This bridge. This cruel, dangerous, deadly bridge. But what was it called? She needed to be more coherent. She had always hoped she was the kind of person who would be good in a crisis. But she felt as if her heart and mind had collapsed, just like the hood of Lillith’s car.
“The foot of the East River Bridge,” she said. “The south side, the Destiny Drive side. She hit a tree. Please. Send someone right away.”
Her toe jammed a boulder half-hidden by the fog. Pain streaked up her shin, and once again she dropped the telephone. This time it clattered against other rocks and disappeared into the fog. Kelly felt the ground for it briefly, but then she heard a sound coming from the Jaguar. A low, moaning sound.
“I’m here,” she called out. She scrambled over wet grass until she finally reached the car.
It was the saddest sight she’d ever seen.
Everything gaped unnaturally, pitifully exposed. The right front headlight had been knocked free and was dangling by wires. Both doors had been ripped open, and the trunk was open, too. Even the glove box had been knocked loose.
Lillith’s personal things were scattered all over the ground—her purse, a pair of running shoes tied together by the laces, an old McDonald’s cup with the straw still in it, her billfold with a picture of Jacob smiling, and a Boudoir Boutique sack full of smashed bath beads that filled the air with the scents of sandalwood and vanilla.
It was so wrong. Lillith was always so elegant and organized. Though Kelly knew it didn’t really matter right now, she had to fight the urge to gather up the things, to protect the privacy that had been so heartlessly violated.
“I’m here,” she said again, though she hadn’t heard any more sounds. She rushed to the driver’s side. Lillith was still sitting upright, the lap belt still connected. This old classic sports car didn’t have an air bag, though Jacob was always bugging Lillith to install one.
Under the distorted hood, the hoses were steaming and hissing, as if they were mad with fury. The front tires no longer touched the ground, and when Kelly reached out to touch Lillith, the car wobbled.
“Lily,” she said. “Lily, are you all right?”
Lillith turned her head slowly and tried to speak. Kelly felt the air draining out of her lungs, the strength out of her muscles, but somehow she found the courage to keep from fainting.
It wasn’t even Lillith anymore. Blood coated everything, but under the blood Lillith’s face was crushed. One cheekbone had disappeared entirely, and her eye seemed to melt into the hollow below. Her nose was flat, and something white poked through the bloody mess of skin. And her mouth…
Everything was swollen, and broken and rearranged. Kelly saw a tooth lying in a gleaming pool of blood on Lillith’s chin, and her stomach spasmed, sending a gag of half-digested spaghetti erupting toward her throat.
She fought it back.
“Hold on, Lily,” she said, and suddenly her voice was strong again. “The ambulance is coming.”
Lillith seemed to be trying to shake her head. She closed her eyes—though the one over the sunken cheek wouldn’t shut properly.
“I’ve already called 911,” Kelly said. Miraculously, one of Lillith’s hands seemed untouched. Kelly took it into her own. It was cold. “They’ll be here soon. They’ll know what to do.”
Lillith moved her lips again. Kelly tried to hear—she made out an e, but the consonants were all a bubbling mush of blood.
Maybe it was Kelly.
Or maybe baby.
Or perhaps it was simply Help me.
“Lily,” she said again. In the movies, people always begged dying friends to keep talking. Was there some magic in that? But how could she ask those mangled lips to try to form words?
God, she was useless. The truth was, she had no idea what to do.
“Lily, I love you,” Kelly said, because there was nothing else to say, and because it seemed important. She was aware that tears were flooding down her face.
Lillith nodded a fraction of an inch. Or maybe Kelly just wanted to believe she did. And then Lillith seemed to try to speak again. Kelly leaned forward.
It was as wet and half-formed as before.
But this time it sounded like Sophie.
It was the last word Lillith Griggs ever spoke. She was dead before the ambulance arrived.
CHAPTER TWO
TOM BECKHAM HAD A SIXTH SENSE about parties. He could predict to within about ten minutes when they were going to go bad or get ugly.
As a rule, that instinct was quite useful. He always slipped out the door just before the champagne or the conversation fell flat. He said his goodbyes five minutes before the fight broke out on the patio or the junior partner puked in the pool.
But fat lot of good that sixth sense could do him today, at this party, which was being held on a boat, about three hundred yards off the Georgia coast. Though his instincts were definitely telling him to get the hell out of here, he couldn’t really do anything about it.
He glanced over the side of the seventy-five-foot yacht, where the Atlantic was sparkling under the cold September sun like a million sequin-tipped knifepoints. Swimming was out of the question, he supposed.
But if things kept deteriorating—and the ratio of guests to alcohol indicated it would—he just might consider it.
“Tom!” A hand grabbed Tom’s forearm so hard he spilled his drink, which, now that the ice had melted, was filled to overflowing. Watered-down scotch mapped cool trails down his hand. “You’re not thinking of jumping overboard, are you? The Smythe case couldn’t have bothered you that much. Everybody loses now and then.”
Shaking scotch from his hand, Tom turned with a smile. Bailey Ormonde, senior partner and head estate-planning attorney in Tom’s law firm, always talked too loudly and shook hands too firmly as a way of compensating for being about five-three. But he wasn’t at heart a bad guy.
“If I jump, it won’t be because of Smythe,” Tom said. “I didn’t lose that case—justice won. The guy had a second set of financial records hidden in his underwear drawer, for God’s sake. It took them about five minutes to find it.”
“What a moron.” Bailey snorted. “Still, this is the second time you’ve mentioned Justice, capital J, in the past week. Not a good thing in our favorite civil litigator. I’m starting to worry about you, pal. What’s the matter?”
Trust Bailey to home in on the real issue. Lawyers in the elite firm of Ormonde, White and Murray weren’t supposed to value Justice over Victory. Justice was a malleable concept. It was whatever you wanted it to be. Victory, on the other hand, was absolute. In the lofty heavens of their penthouse world, the Client was God, and the Blind Lady was either supposed to join the choir or get out of the way.
Tom had understood that when he’d joined the firm ten years ago. He understood it still. So what was the matter with him? Midlife crisis? A little early for that, at only thirty-five. Professional burnout? Ditto on that.
Too soon to grow a conscience, as well—his portfolio wasn’t anywhere nearly big enough yet.
Nope, too early for any of that. So why, in some deep, unspoken place, did he sometimes have the feeling it might be a great deal too late?
But this wasn’t the time for soul-searching, and Bailey was no Freud anyhow. So instead of answering, Tom sipped at his drink and squinted at the cluster of guests near the starboard railing. Such beautiful people, bronzed by expensive machines, and then gilded by the sunlight until they looked like golden statues from the lobby of some fin de siècle opera house.
Bailey was too smart to push it. He knew that, in his way, he’d put Tom on notice, and he trusted Tom to read between the lines.
“So where is your gorgeous lady friend?” Bailey raised one eyebrow. “I hope you haven’t let Coach O’Toole get his hands on her.”
Tom scanned the crowd. Darlene was undoubtedly in there somewhere, though she had arrived on her own, as she’d been running late this morning.
Yep, there she was. Bailey wasn’t exaggerating. She was gorgeous. She stood in a nimbus of sunlight, one hand at her breast and the other lightly curved just at the apex of her thighs, looking for all the world like a Botticelli Venus—not a coincidence, Tom felt sure. Her dress was virginal white, but so filmy and formfitting she looked as if she’d been dipped in milk and set out to be licked clean.
Tom waited for the appreciative twitch to register in his groin, but it didn’t come. Poor Darlene. Not even a twitch, where once there had been earthquakes.
She had no idea, but their clock had just struck midnight. Her magic had run out.
Frankly, he hadn’t even wanted her to come today. She’d begun vigorously working the crowd at these events, smiling her heart out while she talked him up. It annoyed him. It looked like an audition for the role of trophy wife.
“You’re a lucky devil, Beckham,” Bailey said, shaking his head and making a noise that, if he hadn’t been the senior partner, would have been smacking his lips. “When does her lease expire? You always trade ’em in after a year, right? Any chance she thinks short guys are hot?”
Tom wondered if his thoughts about Darlene had registered on his face. He rearranged his features. “Women don’t care if you’re small as long as you’ve got a great big—” he grinned “—credit limit. In that department, you’ve got everyone on this boat whipped. Even Coach O’Toole, in spite of that ridiculous bonus the alums have just added to his paycheck.”
Bailey eyed Mick O’Toole, the head coach for the Midwest Georgia University football team, who stood talking to his host, the most arrogant MGU alum of them all, Trent Saroyan. Saroyan owned the boat, and it might be successfully argued that he owned O’Toole, too.
He’d thrown the party today to celebrate a strong 2–0 start for O’Toole’s second season as MGU head coach. The Spitfires had had a 15–2 season last year, almost making it to the National Championship game. The party, the yacht and the bonus were just the alum’s polite way of saying that this year it had better be the gold ring.
“You think he knows he’s going to get shitcanned if he loses even one game this season?” Bailey’s shrewd eyes held a hint of pity. But just a hint. Their firm represented Trent Saroyan, the yachtsman and check-writer, not the coach.
“Nope,” Tom said. “Look at him. He’s still naive enough to think he can get loud with the boosters.”
Oh, hell. That must be what had activated his sixth sense. Mick O’Toole and Trent Saroyan were standing too close together, and their voices were rising, developing sharp edges. They were arguing about O’Toole’s choice of starting quarterback.
“Crap,” Bailey said. “I’d better try to do something about that.” He dropped his cocktail glass on the mahogany bar and departed.
Not a moment too soon, either. Saroyan held a shot glass in his right hand, but his index finger was extended, and he’d begun to jab it toward O’Toole’s left shoulder, which was a very bad sign.
And here came another one. Apparently noticing that Tom was alone, Darlene began murmuring and air-kissing her way out of her crowd and gliding back over toward him. Her smile didn’t look right. Shit. What had he done now? Had he violated the twenty-minute rule? That was about how long she could take being ignored without getting snitty.
Tom glanced at the water again and wondered how many degrees it was. If only he weren’t wearing his most comfortable old cords, he might actually do it. Between Darlene and O’Toole, this party was going down.
“Hey,” Darlene said, making the word two warm syllables with honey on top. Darlene’s body might be Botticelli, but her voice was pure Gone with the Wind. Still, her smile didn’t look right.
“Hey, there,” he responded carefully. He wondered if it was possible she’d heard Bailey’s comment about her lease expiring. Like all good old boys, Bailey did tend to boom a bit.
But would that be so terrible? Tom was going to have to end it soon anyhow. He didn’t want a trophy wife. He didn’t want a wife period.
Ten years ago, after the…fiasco…he’d decided his life needed some strict ground rules. He had no intentions of living as a monk, all hair shirts and no sex, but he did try to keep all his relationships clean and sweet and mutually satisfying. He’d been pretty successful, so far. That sixth sense about parties applied to love affairs, too, ordinarily.
“I stopped by the apartment on my way over here,” she said.
He tried not to react to her word choice. The apartment, she said these days. Not your apartment. It was just one step short of our apartment, and it was a big mistake, though she obviously didn’t know it.
“I got Otis to let me in,” she added casually.
He wasn’t sure why that shocked him so much. Otis was the seventy-year-old doorman, and he was drooling in love with Darlene. Otis would probably agree to let her into any apartment in the building, even if she were carrying a metal detector and a large black sack.
Tom supposed he was shocked that Darlene would take advantage of the nice old guy like that. Whatever the reason, his smile felt tight.
“And why did you do that?”
“I’d left my driver’s license next to the sofa,” she said, and he had to admit she told the lie beautifully. “Anyhow, I also picked up the mail for you. I knew you’d been waiting for that transcript.”
“Really. Was it there?”
“No.” She lifted her gold clutch and opened it deftly. “But this was.”
She held out a small pink envelope. Immediately he caught the cloying scent of gardenias.
Damn it to hell. He had hoped he’d never see another one of these. But even if he had to, he wasn’t supposed to get it yet. Not for another week.
Could it possibly be a coincidence?
But he knew it wasn’t.
He knew it was Sophie.
As always, he felt his lungs tightening, as if they wanted to reject the sickeningly sweet smell. Or was he just trying to reject the idea that Sophie had sent him another “anniversary” card? Every year he told himself that surely this would be the last. She’d forget, she’d lose interest, her therapists would finally convince her that it did no good, especially since he never responded.
It had been ten years now. Ten years since he’d walked out of a church filled with these poisonously sweet white flowers. Ten years since he’d walked out on Sophie.
But she’d never forgotten. And she clearly intended to make sure that he didn’t, either. Which was fairly ironic, actually.
Darlene pushed the card forward a fraction of an inch, and he realized he needed to do something. He held out his hand calmly and took it. He flipped it over, glanced at the return address just to be sure the gardenia smell hadn’t tricked him, then flipped it back to see whether Sophie had addressed his name the usual way, with a small heart where the O in Tom should be.
She had.
No wonder Darlene’s smile looked so tight and thin.
“Well?” She snapped her little gold clutch shut sharply.
“Well, what?” He slipped the envelope into his wind-breaker pocket, patted it to be sure it was secure, then zipped up his jacket against the fresh, high wind that hinted at a squall before sunset.
Darlene paused, her mouth half-open. She obviously knew the next few moments were dangerous and was looking for the right words.
“It’s really too cold for a boat party, don’t you think?” He hunched his shoulders. “But I guess Saroyan couldn’t wait till spring to show off his new baby.”
In his head Tom begged Darlene to be very careful, to take the conversational fire exit he was offering. He didn’t like being cornered, and she’d gone too far when she’d pawed through his mail. And he damn sure didn’t want to talk to her about Sophie.
If she forced him to do this now, he might say things he’d regret.
She wasn’t great at reading his thoughts, though, and he knew his face revealed only a tilted smile and a slightly sarcastic arch to one brow. It was an expression he’d perfected over the last decade.
The arched brow probably tipped her over the edge. Darlene had odd moments of self-respect, and though she might let a man cheat on her, she wouldn’t stand for being mocked.
“Who exactly,” she demanded, “is this Sophie Mellon?”
What a stupid question. What did it matter? When a love affair was over, did it make any difference exactly what, or who, had killed it?
When he didn’t answer, Darlene’s jaw tightened. “So far I know this much. She writes your name like a lovesick adolescent, and she soaks her cards in cheap perfume. Things haven’t been right between us lately, Tom. Is this why? Is she someone I should worry about? Or is she just a—”
A what? Darlene seemed to understand she’d gone too far, but the echo of the unspoken thought seemed to hang in the air between them. What word had she been going to say?
And what was the right word, anyhow? What was Sophie? Slut? Stalker? Psycho? Maybe all those labels applied. And many more, as well.
Maybe the best word was cursed. Poor beautiful, tormented Sophie was cursed, and still she signed his name with a heart.
Suddenly Tom realized he was furious. If Darlene insisted on doing this right here, right now, he was ready. He felt his smile tilt another inch. It probably looked like a smirk by now. He didn’t give a damn about that, either.
“Sophie Mellon is the woman I almost married.”
“What?” Darlene’s eyebrows knitted hard. “Married? When?”
“Ten years ago.”
She shook her head, looking confused and slightly annoyed. She looked, he thought, like an infant rejecting an unappetizing spoonful of strained peas. “But surely…” She took a breath. “If that’s true, why—why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t important.”
Her chin went up. “Wasn’t important?”
He shrugged. “Not to you.”
That was rough. Two circles of hot pink broke out on her skin. But her chin didn’t waver. She was a strong woman, and a distant part of Tom admired her. Maybe she was strong enough that, someday soon, she’d thank him for setting her free.
“When you say you almost married her… What does almost mean? How close did you come?”
“Close enough to hear the wedding bells at my back as I drove out of town.”
“My God. You mean you left her waiting at the altar?”
“No,” he said, still smiling. “Technically, that’s what jilted grooms do. I believe the bride waits in an anteroom off to the side until her husband-to-be shows up and takes his place.”
She hesitated. “But you didn’t. Show up, I mean.”
“No.”
The pink cheeks had faded, leaving behind an ivory pall of shock. It was finally sinking in. Her gaze scoured his face, as if she wondered where her charming Tom had gone.
He wouldn’t be receiving cards from this one for the next decade, that was sure. Good. One tearstained ghost, annually rattling the rusty chains of his ruined conscience, was enough for any man.
She swallowed. “But why? Why didn’t you go through with it?”
For the first time, he hesitated, too.
“Let’s just say…I decided I’d make a rotten husband.”
Amazingly, she balked at that. She wasn’t ready to let go of all her illusions—or her plans.
“Oh, Tom,” she said, reaching out with gentling fingers. “Honey. Don’t say—”
He backed up a quarter of an inch and restored his tilted, insulting smile. “Why not? It’s true—I’m not good husband material. I think I knew that the night I almost screwed her bridesmaid.”
A gasp. And then, as if by instinct, she reared back and slapped him.
It would have caused quite a stir, except that, at the exact same moment, Trent Saroyan shoved Coach O’Toole over the yacht’s elegant teak railing and into the Atlantic Ocean and, as Tom had predicted, all hell broke loose at the party.
THOUGH IT WAS ONLY about eleven-thirty, the darkness out here in the rural Georgia woods was cool, deep and damp, the kind of night that predicted pea-soup fog in the morning.
Kelly stood at her worktable, so absorbed in cutting a very expensive sheet of purple drapery glass that she listened to the muffled twig-cracking sound several seconds before she realized it was the wrong sound at the wrong time. Most of the little animals that shared these woods with her went to bed early—and few of them were capable of producing such big noises anyhow.
Carefully she put down the glass cutter and listened. The sounds continued, quite close now.
It was probably nothing. Maybe something bigger than usual, like a deer, had wandered into her yard.
Still, a shiver of fear shimmied through her.
She stared at the studio window. She couldn’t see anything, of course. Nothing but her own reflection. The old, warped glass distorted a lot, but she still saw a skinny, scruffy redhead with a sad, wide-eyed face.
A sudden heavy, muffled thud came from just beyond the back door.
What was wrong with her? She couldn’t just stand here, frozen. When she’d bought this old place for her stained-glass studio three months ago, her ex-husband Brian had warned that she’d be a nervous wreck way out here with no neighbors. She hadn’t been, though. She’d done fine until two nights ago, when Lily had…
When Lily had died.
In the long, painful forty-eight hours since then, Kelly had been reduced to a mass of singing nerves and emotional confusion. Tears were never more than one thought away. And fear, too. Not active terror, but a shadowy sense that the world was not benign, or even neutral, but was instead somehow malignant, just waiting for you to make a mistake it could exploit.
Like Lily, who’d rushed through life and had never wanted to stop for boring maintenance chores, like putting brake fluid in an aging car.
Or like Kelly, working alone late at night in a falling-down studio with no locks on the doors.
The doctor who’d seen Kelly that night had assured her this reaction would be quite normal. He had prescribed sleeping pills, which she didn’t take, because they seemed to open the floodgate to dreams. She turned to her work instead. She had several commissions to complete in the next weeks, and besides, the precision and focus required calmed her. The careful piecing together of small, seemingly random shapes, which came together to create a coherent whole, comforted her. Stained glass, she realized, was a pretty good analogy for life.
It had only been two days, she reminded herself. The funeral wasn’t even scheduled until the day after tomorrow. Eventually, she’d find her equilibrium again. For now, she just had to force herself to pretend a courage she didn’t really possess.
Though she’d been cutting without her work gloves on—one of her habitual sins—she quietly reached over, opened her drawer and slid her right hand into the soft, protective leather.
Then she picked up the freshly bisected sheet of glass, which came to a lethal point at the tip, and walked to the back of the studio.
She adjusted her grip on the glass. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel her pulse in her fingertips. Slowly, she opened the door….
And found herself looking into the shining black-marble eyes of a raccoon, who had somehow managed to climb to the very top of her three-tiered plant stand and was trying to reach the bird feeder that hung from the soffit.
The poor thing looked mortified, just as frozen into his awkward position as she had been moments earlier. He was huge, with a fat, sprawling belly that suggested this wasn’t his first late-night raid. The long gray streamer of moss that dangled from his ear proved he had tried other approaches first.
One of the branches of the nearest oak came within six feet of the bird feeder. That must have been the thud she’d heard. The little scavenger had jumped and missed.
His stricken gaze seemed to be asking her to pretend she didn’t see him. Smiling a little, she turned her head away. She wasn’t even sure raccoons ate seeds, but if he wanted them that badly, he could have them. She could refill the feeder for the birds in the morning.
It was time to go to bed. She put her hand on the doorknob.
Someone touched her shoulder.
Electric currents of panic shot, primal and unwilled, through every vein. Her right arm came up.
“Kelly?”
“Jacob?” The sudden withdrawal of adrenaline left her limbs weak. With a loud exhale, she slumped against the door, just under the bare bulb that served as an entry light.
“God, Jacob,” she breathed.
Thankfully she’d recognized the voice before she’d had time to slash out with the glass. As it was, she had already raised it to breast level.
Jacob Griggs, Lillith’s husband, looked down at her makeshift weapon, but it didn’t seem to frighten him. He seemed beyond caring that he’d come within six inches of being impaled on a dagger of cut glass.
“I scared you,” he said heavily. He looked up at her. “I’m sorry.”
He looked horrible. His face was gray, but his eyes were small and red-rimmed inside puffy circles of grief. His hair, normally so thick and shiny Lillith had rarely been able to keep her fingers out of it, seemed to have dulled and thinned almost overnight.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said. She took his arm, and realized it was shaking. Two days ago, Jacob had been a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who jogged and played racquetball and danced and gave great parties, and generally made every woman in Cathedral Cove jealous of Lillith. In forty-eight hours, he had turned into an old man.
But what was he doing here at nearly midnight? She looked into those eyes again and wondered if he even knew where he was.
“Jacob, do you want to come in?”
He just stared at her.
She squeezed his hand. “Did you need to talk?”
To her horror, he began to cry. His face twisted with the agony of trying to hold it back. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She put her arm around his waist, though he was a full five inches taller. She wasn’t sure he wouldn’t collapse.
He was still repeating the same broken words. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he moaned.
“What is it? What don’t you know, Jacob?”
He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. His lips were dripping with tears. Finally he groaned and bent over double, his hands on his knees, like a runner pushed beyond endurance. “I don’t know how to live without her.”
CHAPTER THREE
IMOGENE MELLON HAD LONG AGO stopped believing in justice.
Maybe, she thought as she slowly descended Coeur Volé’s wide, twining staircase in the predawn hours, that had happened on her wedding night. The longest night of her life.
The night she’d discovered her handsome, socially prominent husband wasn’t normal.
Well, maybe she should choose another phrase. In Imogene’s youth “not normal” had been a euphemism for homosexual, and lots of young women had no doubt found themselves married to men who were merely looking for camouflage. Imogene believed she could have lived with that. At least then, maybe she and Adler might have learned to be friends.
Instead she had discovered that Adler liked women just fine. He specifically liked to hurt them. Nothing too dramatic. Nothing that left marks or required care. He’d called it “spicing things up.” He’d implied that if you peeked into any bedroom in town you’d find a few of these “toys.”
It made him extremely potent. By the end of her first week of marriage, Imogene was pregnant with Sebastian. A year later, Sophie was conceived. After that, Imogene took birth-control pills secretly for several years. When Adler found out, he broke her wrist, and two months later she was pregnant again, with Samantha.
Her beautiful babies, almost all of them conceived in undignified tableaux of sadism and pain. Still, the children should have been her consolation, her reward for enduring without complaint. And they were, for a while. Then, gradually, she’d begun to understand that they weren’t normal, either.
So much for justice.
She reached the wide staircase landing now, and, as she did almost every morning, she paused to appreciate the way the rising sun lit the huge stained-glass window. She liked to watch the figures come to life. It made her feel less alone in this haunted mansion.
Jean Laurent, the French artist Adler had hired, had done a magnificent job. The twenty-by-twelve window of St. George slaying the dragon had bold colors and great drama.
The dying dragon dominated the bottom third of the window, his sinuous body curled around the feet of the knight, his scales shining like peacock feathers. Up from the dragon, St. George rose like a human tower, tall and triumphant. He lifted his sword into the air, and on the tip of the sword he had impaled the dragon’s glowing red heart.
It was not any failing of Jean Laurent’s talent that caused Imogene to identify more with the dragon than with the resplendent knight. After all, from ground level, the dragon was mostly what one saw. And, naturally, Imogene couldn’t help comparing the handsome St. George to the handsome Adler Mellon. St. George seemed to be enjoying his kill a little too much.
Imogene sometimes wondered whether Jean Laurent might have liked the dragon best, as well. The artist had spent so much time and empathetic energy on the dragon’s face. Its eyes were almost human—green, gray, silver and blue pools of inarticulate misery.
It took about twenty minutes for the sun to climb high enough to illuminate the entire window, but Imogene always waited patiently for the transformation to complete itself. The heart, naturally, was the last to burst into brilliance. The red, jewel-like heart, so real it seemed to be still throbbing.
Imogene had asked Jean Laurent if the window had a name, like any other work of art. He had smiled and turned to Adler with a bow. Coeur Volé, Jean had said. Of course.
Another reason to think perhaps Jean had sympathized with the dragon.
Coeur Volé was French for Stolen Heart.
“Mom?” Samantha was standing about ten steps above her. She still wore her nightgown. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Imogene said. What a ridiculous question. Of course she wasn’t all right. She was dying. They had told her she had maybe a month or two, no longer. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Do you want some breakfast?”
“No.”
Still Samantha hesitated, her hand on the banister. “Do you want anything?”
I want to live.
And I want justice. For my own tormented body, and for the poisoned lives of my children.
She let her gaze leave the agonized eyes of the doomed dragon. She let it slide up the shining armor, through the muscular thighs and powerful shoulders, and into the lusty, inflamed eyes of St. George.
Yes, she thought, feeling something stir in her own loins, finally. This, here at the very end, was what she wanted.
I want, for once in my life, to be the one holding the sword.
TOM HAD A BAD TASTE in his mouth, and it wasn’t from the salmon salad, which he ordered every time he came to this restaurant and which had been as delicious as ever.
The taste came instead from the conversation, especially his part of it. His words had a sticky, artificial after-taste. The hard-to-digest flavor of manipulative half-truths and sugarcoated threats.
From the minute Coach Mick O’Toole had been fished out of the ocean, red-faced and spluttering and flailing his arms wildly, splashing everyone on the boat with salt water, Bailey Ormonde had made it clear that it would be Tom’s job to make sure the man didn’t sue.
Thus, this hastily arranged lunch with O’Toole, who hadn’t even had the sense to bring his own lawyer.
Tom knew the drill. There wasn’t much O’Toole could really do to hurt Saroyan, even if he did decide to sue. People like Saroyan paid big bucks to Ormonde, White and Murray to do what they euphemistically called “asset-protection planning.” That was Murray’s specialty, and he was good at it. Saroyan could pretty much get drunk and run down a convent full of nuns with his SUV, and, though he might do time in the slammer, he’d emerge as rich as ever.
One soggy football coach claiming whiplash didn’t have a chance. But he could annoy and embarrass Saroyan, who had a very thin skin. Saroyan didn’t want a nuisance lawsuit that would keep this unfortunate anecdote alive at every party for the next year. As he’d said during their meeting yesterday, “Goddamn it, boy, just make it go away.”
Considering that Saroyan was only about ten years older than Tom, and had earned every penny of his fortune buying up slums in Atlanta and then painting over the rotten buildings and raising the rents, that “boy” comment had annoyed the hell out of Tom.
Still…this was his job. Bailey always said lawyers were actually diplomats. More like gymnasts, was how Tom saw it. He’d just spent the past hour kissing O’Toole’s dumb ass while twisting his arms back and tying his hands.
He ordered coffee to help with the foul taste in his mouth.
“You know, I’m used to tempers,” O’Toole was saying. He adjusted his neck brace, which did look damn uncomfortable. “Try coaching a bunch of college kids, and you’ll learn about tempers, that’s for sure. The real problem with Saroyan is that he doesn’t understand football. And if he thinks he’s going to call the plays on the field, he’s got another think coming.”
Tom considered giving O’Toole a little friendly advice, but then he looked at that thick neck and those beady eyes, and he decided to have another sip of coffee instead.
“Saroyan didn’t even play football when he was at MGU. He was a math major.” O’Toole said math as if it were something ridiculous, like majoring in tiddlywinks. He didn’t seem to see the connection between Saroyan’s studies and his ability to buy and sell O’Toole ten times a day.
Tom drained his coffee and tilted his watch under the table. Fifteen more minutes of this, at least, before he could check his watch openly, gasp and imply that he’d been enjoying himself so much he’d lost track of the time.
Diplomat? Gymnast? Babysitter might be more accurate. Ego babysitter. He tried to tune out the little voice that said this was nothing a grown man should be doing for a living.
Suddenly, his cell phone began to vibrate. Apparently there was a God.
Giving O’Toole a “gosh, isn’t this annoying, just when we were having such a good time?” smile, Tom unclipped his phone and answered without even bothering to look at the caller ID. Ordinarily he screened, having just enough old girlfriends to be cautious, but right now he’d welcome a call from any one of them.
“This is Tom Beckham,” he said formally, already folding his napkin and crooking a finger to let the waiter know it was time for the check. Whoever really was on the other end of this telephone, as far as O’Toole was concerned, it was urgent firm business.
At first there was just silence. And then he heard a soft female voice.
“Tom?”
For about six tenths of a second he honestly didn’t recognize the voice. And then it hit him. Hit him hard.
It was Kelly.
An image rushed toward him, leapfrogging the years. An image of the two of them in a dark corner, laughing at first, and then touching, and then she was crying, and he was up against her, and she was kissing him and whispering his name, but crying, crying the whole time.
Her red-gold hair falling loose against the green satin of her dress, the fresh-apple smell of her, the salt of her tears on his lips, the insanity inside him.
“Tom? Are you there? It’s Kelly. Kelly Ralston…I mean Kelly Carpenter.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
Now that his mind was working again, he understood that something must have happened. Something bad. She hadn’t called him in ten years, though at first he had deluded himself that she might. No one from the wedding party had ever called him, except Mr. Mellon, who had actually come out to Atlanta ready to beat Tom, he’d said, until he no longer knew his own name and had to be fed with a straw.
“I—I don’t know if you heard,” she said, her voice still somber and husky. He wondered if she’d been crying again. Who made her cry these days?
“Heard what?”
“About Lillith. Lillith Griggs. I mean, she became Lillith Griggs, you knew she and Jacob got married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that.” He and Jacob had been good friends back in law school. Jacob still kept in touch, still wrote now and then, though of course he didn’t admit that to Lillith, who had, like Kelly, been one of Sophie’s bridesmaids and therefore subscribed to the official position that Tom Beckham was scum. “What about Lillith?”
“She was in a car accident. Three days ago.”
“Is she all right?”
“No.” A wretched pause. “She was killed.”
The waiter came over then and held a check for Tom to sign. He scrawled something, almost glad of the distraction. He needed time to absorb the news.
He hadn’t known Lillith well, but she’d always seemed much more…alive than most people. She was always the one laughing, playing practical jokes like wearing stiletto heels to the rehearsal so that the lineup by height suddenly seemed all wrong. She was a beauty and a brain and a class clown all in one. What kind of automobile accident had been savage enough to extinguish all that?
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said carefully, glancing over at O’Toole, who was tonguing around in his empty drink, trying to hook a piece of ice and suck any lingering vodka from its surface. O’Toole met Tom’s gaze over the glass and frowned, pointing at the telephone.
Tom covered the mouthpiece with his palm.
“We’re done here, O’Toole,” he said, though he knew that those four words might well undo all the goodwill he’d spent the past hour building.
O’Toole put his glass down slowly, giving Tom an incredulous look. “Damn right we are,” he said. He tossed his napkin on the table, scraped his chair back loudly and walked away.
“Tom, are you still there?”
Tom took his hand off the telephone. “Yes. Sorry. How is Jacob?”
“He’s a mess,” Kelly said. “That’s why I’m calling. The funeral is tomorrow, and he asked me to let you know. He hopes you can come. I do, too. He needs a friend…and you seem to be the one he wants.”
It was subtle, but he could hear how inexplicable she found that fact to be.
“Okay,” he said.
There was another pause. “You’ll come?” She must have been expecting an argument.
“Yes,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there. What time is the funeral?”
“One. We’re all meeting at the house and riding together. His house.” She took an audible breath. “But Tom…if I tell him you’re coming, if I get his hopes up, and then you—”
“I’ll be there.” He heard the doubt quivering in her silence. He couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t know that, since he’d left Cathedral Cove, he had never made a promise he didn’t keep. Of course, he made damn few promises.
“Kelly, I’m telling you I will be there. Have I ever lied to you?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Not to me.”
“Then trust me,” he said, and in spite of himself a wry note crept in. He could feel his tilted smile nudging at his lips. But come on. Had anyone on this earth ever spoken a more ironic sentence? “I’ll be there.”
KELLY KNEW BETTER than to trust Tom Beckham, so she couldn’t understand why she was so upset when he didn’t show up at the funeral home, or at the graveside service.
She was just mad at herself, that was all. She should never have told Jacob that Tom was coming. He had kept glancing over his shoulder at the service, and now that they were back at home, every time the door opened he looked up expectantly.
She stood in the kitchen, carefully pulling the plastic wrap off plates of deviled eggs and pans of meat loaf, and trying not to feel a little angry with Jacob, too.
But darn it. He had friends, lots of them. People who really cared about him, people who filled his house and his refrigerator, people who called and stopped by, who prayed at his side and cried at his side and loved Lily almost as much as he did.
Why weren’t they enough? Why did he need Tom Beckham, too?
Why did anyone need Tom Beckham?
The door opened, and to Kelly’s surprise a lovely blonde walked in, dressed in the most elegant little black funeral dress she’d ever seen. It was Samantha Mellon, Sophie’s little sister.
“Hi, Kelly,” Samantha said softly, brushing her long, silky hair back behind her shoulder and smiling. “They told me you were in here. I thought maybe I could help?”
Kelly stuffed the plastic into the trash can, wiped her hands on a towel, and reached out to give Samantha a hello hug. It was very sweet of her to come—and probably somewhat risky. Over the years, her mother and brother had developed an intractably hostile attitude toward every one of the young men and women who had been in Sophie’s wedding party.
As best Kelly could understand, Mrs. Mellon and Sebastian felt that the bridesmaids and groomsmen had all abandoned Sophie after she’d been jilted. True friends would have stuck by her, defended her. If they had, Sophie might never have ended up in an institution.
Was that true? Kelly’s memory of that time was clouded with misery and guilt. It was true that the friendships had ended when the wedding fell apart, but whose choice had that been? Had Sophie avoided them because they reminded her of a day so horrible she couldn’t bear to relive it? Or had they avoided her, the way you might instinctively avoid someone whose luck seemed to have turned spectacularly bad?
Some of them had tried to make contact in the weeks after Tom disappeared, Kelly was sure of that. But Sophie hadn’t been willing. Or maybe she just hadn’t been ready.
Maybe they should have tried harder.
Kelly hadn’t been able to try at all. A huge wall stood between them. She always wondered if Sophie knew about the night that Kelly and Tom had…
Just as she’d always wondered whether that night had played a part in the tragedy that came next.
But there was no one to ask. Tom was gone, and, soon after, Sophie was lost to them, too.
Kelly and Samantha hadn’t seen much of each other through the years—things would always be too awkward for that. But Kelly was still fond of her.
Suddenly she remembered what Lillith had been saying right before the accident. That Sophie had been let out again.
“Sam, Sophie didn’t come with you, did she?”
Samantha’s gray-blue eyes widened. “Of course not. Sophie is—” She hesitated. “She’s still in North Carolina.”
In North Carolina. Is that where the newest mental-health facility was? Over the past decade, if the grapevine could be trusted, Sophie had been in and out of five or six different resident institutions.
So did that mean Lillith had been wrong? Did that mean the light in the tower window hadn’t been Sophie after all?
“She hasn’t come home? I heard that she had.”
“No, she’s not up to being on her own right now. The doctor said, with the anniversary coming up so soon…” Samantha looked perplexed. “Who told you she was?”
“I think Lillith had heard it somewhere.”
Samantha shook her head sadly. “The gossips must be at it again. I think the anniversary always stirs things up, don’t you? But frankly, this terrible accident would be so hard for her. Just this once, I’m glad she’s not here.”
Kelly reached out and touched Samantha’s hand. Poor Sam. Now that Sebastian had married and moved to Raleigh, Sam was living alone at Coeur Volé with their mother, who had never been a picnic but who had become even more eccentric through the years.
Sam looked amazingly like Sophie these days. All the Mellon siblings looked similar—the lush blond hair, the deep-set eyes, the sex appeal and the elegance. Sebastian and Sophie had often been mistaken for twins. They were only a year apart and they had an intimacy that seemed almost preternatural, the kind you sometimes do see in twins.
Samantha was five years younger, and it wasn’t until she grew up that the striking Mellon looks displayed themselves. Now the only real difference was in the eyes. Sophie’s and Sebastian’s were a dramatic peacock blue, and they sparkled with an essence of danger, a flash of the untamable. Sam’s eyes were light, and her gaze was gentle, almost humble.
It made Kelly’s heart ache to look at her. This was what Sophie should have been.
“Well, anyway, I’d love some help,” Kelly said. “So many people have brought food. He’ll never eat it all, so we might as well use it up today.”
Samantha nodded and began efficiently stacking small sandwiches on a large silver plate. “He seems very weak,” she said. “It’s so terrible. It’s obviously broken his heart.”
“Yes.” Kelly blinked back moisture. This wasn’t her tragedy. This wasn’t her day to cry. But it was hard. A week ago she’d been in this kitchen drinking coffee with Lily from these same cups. “I suppose time will help. It’s still so new.”
“When I talked to him just now, he told me he was waiting for Tom Beckham.” Sam looked over at Kelly somberly. “Is that true, or is it just wishful thinking? I didn’t think we’d ever see Tom in Cathedral Cove again.”
Kelly sighed and slid the rest of the potato salad into the refrigerator. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He asked me to call Tom, and I did. Tom promised he’d be here, but—”
Samantha smiled ruefully. “But historically Tom’s promises haven’t really been worth much.”
“Right. You wouldn’t believe how distant he sounded on the phone when I told him about Lillith.”
She didn’t mention that it had taken her two hours to get up the nerve to dial the number, and when he’d answered she’d found that she needed to sit down, because her legs wouldn’t hold her.
“Ten years,” she said. “We hadn’t exchanged a single word in ten years. And yet, throughout the call his voice was completely bland and impersonal. He might as well have been talking to his secretary.”
Samantha lifted one graceful shoulder philosophically, as if to say what did you expect?
Good question. It made Kelly feel ridiculous to admit that she had expected more. In the private photo album of her heart, Tom Beckham had been the most-often-relived memory, in spite of the ache it always brought. She had about a dozen pictures that never seemed to fade: Tom in the gardens of Coeur Volé, with roses behind him and the river at his feet; Tom dancing with Sophie, tall and handsome in his tuxedo, with Sophie’s silver dress flashing rainbows as she twirled under the chandelier; Tom turning to Kelly in the darkness, fierce and full of hunger…
She was a fool. While she’d been wistfully fingering those images, she’d assumed that he, too, took them out now and then and remembered. But apparently he’d long since thrown them away. As she should have.
“I heard that you were behind her when it happened,” Samantha said suddenly. “I heard you were with her when she died.”
Kelly looked up. “Yes.”
“That must have been awful. I’m so sorry. But at least—at least she wasn’t alone at the end.”
“Yes.” Kelly had thought of that, but she wondered how much comfort she had really been. Lillith had seemed dazed, already moving away from the blood and the fog and the hissing car. Her cold hand had not responded to Kelly’s touch. Kelly had been just inches away, but in every way that mattered, Lillith had died alone anyhow. Perhaps everyone did.
“Was she still conscious? Did she say anything?”
Kelly closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sam, but if I keep talking about this, I’m going to fall apart, and Jacob doesn’t need that today.” She picked up the plate of deviled eggs and handed it to the other woman. “Let’s get the food out there, okay?”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Samantha was embarrassed, her fair skin tinged with pink.
Kelly remembered how easy it used to be for Sophie to hurt Sam’s feelings. “Scram, brat,” Sophie would say, and Sam’s blue eyes would fill with tears. She had idolized her older siblings, and Sophie and Bastian had exploited that shamelessly.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said, giving Sam a warm smile. “Do you think you can grab that plate, too? Jacob doesn’t like meat loaf, so if it doesn’t get eaten today it’ll go to waste.”
“No problem.” Sam balanced both trays like a waitress, and Kelly took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door. She looked around, trying to locate Jacob in the crowd, which had swelled considerably while she was in the kitchen.
And then she saw him. He was at the door, shaking hands with a tall, dark, handsome stranger who wasn’t a stranger at all.
It was Tom Beckham.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LIVING ROOM of the Griggs’ house was huge and airy, the perfect room for two energetic lawyers with a healthy combined income and a zest for entertaining.
One whole wall was ceiling-to-floor windows that overlooked a sunny bricked garden, and the ceiling was at least thirteen feet high.
Upstairs, there were three bedrooms, three luxurious bathrooms and a billiard room—which would soon have become a nursery. And of course the kitchen was terrific, but most of the square footage of the house was found in this one gracious room.
At the moment, though, it didn’t seem big enough. The minute Kelly recognized Tom at the door, she felt short of breath, as if the room didn’t hold enough air for the both of them.
Samantha seemed a little taken aback, too. She paused just in front of Kelly. “He did come,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.”
But then something strange happened.
Nothing happened.
No one gasped, no one froze with shock, no one jumped from his seat and pointed at Tom, screaming, “There he is! He’s the one!”
A couple of women glanced over toward the door—and then surreptitiously ran hands over their hair or adjusted their skirts more flatteringly around their knees. But, for the most part, Tom Beckham’s return to Cathedral Cove was a nonevent.
Though Sophie Mellon’s jilting and the emotional breakdown that followed were legendary in the Cove, Kelly realized that very few people in the room had ever met Tom Beckham or knew what he looked like. In their minds, he probably looked like a movie pirate, or a highwayman—someone bigger than life and as cold as the last stroke of midnight.
The kind of mythical man who could destroy a woman simply by not wanting her.
Looking at him now, Kelly realized that, in her mind, too, the same thing had happened. Tom Beckham had become an idea, not a human being.
She had forgotten real-life details, the little things that made him Tom, and not just the infamous runaway groom. Things like how long-waisted he was, which always made it look as if he were wearing his slacks low on his narrow hips. Like how the right side of his smile lifted slightly higher than the left. Or how he tried to keep his dark brown hair off his broad forehead, but never quite could.
“Kelly,” Samantha said quietly. “I think I’m just going to slip out the back, if you don’t mind. It’s awkward. I mean, I didn’t think he—”
“I understand,” Kelly said. Of course Samantha wasn’t eager to come face-to-face with Tom Beckham again. “I’ll tell Jacob goodbye for you.”
“Thanks,” Samantha said. “I’ll—I’ll talk to you soon.”
They both knew it wasn’t true. They had seen each other maybe half a dozen times in the past ten years. But it eased the moment, and Kelly appreciated it. She nodded, and watched as Sam set her plates down on a table, then retreated to the kitchen and, from there, presumably out the back door.
Kelly began to circulate with her platter of deviled eggs. Watching Jacob and Tom from the corner of her eye, she tried to subtly wind her way over toward the piano, the spot farthest from the front door.
But she wasn’t much of a strategist. When the room was this crowded, the large grand piano and the semicircular mauve silk sofa created a beautifully decorated dead end. She turned around and found herself staring at Tom, with no escape route in sight.
Damn him for being even more attractive than ever.
“Hi, Kelly.” His smile wasn’t big enough to be inappropriate at a funeral, but it still had that lopsided effect that always made him seem to be secretly laughing at everyone. “It’s been a long time. You look great.”
Like hell she did. She had been crying for four days, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, in case she started crying again. Besides, she was thirty-two now, not twenty-two, and women didn’t just keep on getting better the way men did.
She was glad the half-empty deviled egg platter kept her from having to decide whether to shake his hand.
“Hello, Tom,” she said. “I’m glad you could finally make it.”
He obviously heard the implied criticism. He dropped the smile. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here for the funeral. I did try. But I was at the mercy of a very inconsiderate jury.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said briskly. “I’m sure Jacob understands.”
Tom glanced back toward the center of the room, where Jacob was sitting on the edge of an armchair, talking to Lillith’s parents. Lillith’s mother had her purse in one hand and a mangled tissue in the other. They had to fly back to Ohio, and they must be saying goodbye to Jacob. All three of them looked exhausted.
“He’s much worse than I expected,” Tom said. “I thought— He was always so tough.”
Kelly gave Tom a look. Hadn’t he learned anything in the past ten years? Hadn’t he found anyone he could truly care about?
“He’s still tough,” she said flatly. “But he loved Lillith. A lot. They had one of the happiest marriages I’ve ever seen.”
Tom’s smile returned, just for a flash. “Ahh,” he said. “But is that really saying very much?”
She chose not to respond to that. She wasn’t really shocked—he’d always had a cynical side. And life had a tendency to deepen cynicism, not eliminate it, especially when you weren’t even trying to fight back.
No, she wasn’t shocked, but she was sorry. She didn’t remember many of the things they’d said to each other back then—most of it had been silly and inconsequential, all the deeper meanings and growing awareness lurking between the lines. On their last night, though, he’d spoken one line she would never forget.
When he had finally accepted that they could never be lovers, not even once, he had looked at her with the bleakest face she’d ever seen, and he’d said, “I would have liked to know how it felt to make love to you—I might have built a soul out of a memory like that.”
Through the years, she had sometimes felt generous enough to hope that some other woman would bring him a memory like that. One untainted with the guilt and shame theirs would have carried.
“Have I offended you, belittling wedded bliss?” He arched an eyebrow. “Are you still such an idealist, Kelly? I heard you tried marriage out for a little while yourself. Was it all silver bells and scented bowers?”
“No,” she said. “I’m sure you know that Brian and I divorced two years ago.”
“Yes. Jacob mentioned it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was amicable. Brian and I are still friends.”
“Good for you,” he said. “Very civilized.”
She didn’t answer that, either. She couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her, or if that slightly snide tone was natural to him now. But there really wasn’t anything to say about getting into or out of a marriage that didn’t take them down a dangerous conversational road.
She shifted the platter, which was starting to feel heavy. “I guess I’d better offer these around,” she said. “But it’s good to see you. I’m glad you could make it. I know Jacob would have been disappointed if you—”
The murmur of subdued voices that had been softly pulsing through the room was broken suddenly by the jarring sound of musical notes. Four of them, played on the piano.
Kelly and Tom both looked quickly. Jacob sat on the piano bench, his head lowered onto his arm, which was draped across the edge. With one finger, he stabbed at the piano keys. Four notes. Over and over.
Kelly knew that tune. It was the refrain of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Lillith had loved its jazzy, upbeat charm. Kelly could almost see her now, dancing out of the kitchen with a platter of perfectly roasted Cornish hen, which she’d just whipped up for the dinner party, singing, “Come on and hear, Come on and hear…”
Jacob kept playing. Everyone in the room was watching.
Kelly dropped the deviled-egg plate onto the coffee table and hurried over to Jacob. She knelt beside the piano. Though she couldn’t see his face, she could tell by the movement of his shoulders that he was crying. The four notes grew louder, more strident.
“Jacob.” She put her hand on his arm, which was as hard as rock. “Jacob, don’t.”
His fingers paused, and as the seconds ticked away she felt the tension drain from his muscles. He lifted his head, and his face was running with tears.
“I haven’t slept, Kelly,” he said, as if they were alone in the room. “I can’t. I wake up, and she’s not there.”
“I know,” she said. Had he really not slept in four days? No wonder he couldn’t cope. “You miss her. But you need to sleep, Jacob. She wouldn’t want you to make yourself sick.”
“I don’t care what she wants,” he said, his voice harsh, though new tears kept coursing down his flooded cheeks. “She left me. She didn’t care what I needed.”
“Oh, Jacob. You know that’s not true.”
He buried his face in his arm again, unwilling to listen. Kelly scanned the room, checking all the shocked and pitying faces. Was Jacob’s doctor here? His minister? This was grief more profound, more complex, than she had any idea how to handle.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up.
Tom was standing behind her. He tilted his head slightly, asking her to move away and let him in. Reluctantly, she did so. At the very least, it would free her to call the doctor.
“Jacob, listen to me,” Tom said with a voice that was amazingly gentle. “Let’s go upstairs. You’re falling apart, pal. You’ve got to get some sleep.”
Jacob frowned, but to Kelly’s surprise he seemed to be listening. “How?” he asked, sounding like a child who would like to obey but doesn’t understand what’s required. “How?”
“Simple.” Tom held out his hand. Dangling from two fingers was a big gold-labeled bottle of scotch. He must have grabbed it from the liquor cabinet beside the sofa. “We’ll get wasted. We’ll drink till we drop, just like the old days.”
Jacob blinked. Tom reached out, hooked one hand under his friend’s elbow and urged him to his feet. Jacob nodded wearily. He rubbed his hand over his face, wiping away the tears just as if he had a handkerchief, though his palm was bare.
He put his other hand on Tom’s shoulder. He already looked a little drunk, though Kelly knew it was simple exhaustion.
“Did I tell you?” Jacob frowned hard, staring with glazed eyes at Tom. “Did I tell you Lily was going to have a baby?”
In the back of the room someone sobbed softly.
“No,” Tom said, never relinquishing eye contact with Jacob. “You didn’t tell me. Come on upstairs, and let’s talk about it.”
When they were gone, and the voices in the room began to murmur again, Kelly turned and shoved through the swinging door into the kitchen. She put the heels of her hands on the blue granite counter and tried to take deep breaths. Help him, Lily, she prayed silently. Help him to go to sleep.
“You should stay away from that one.”
Kelly’s head jerked up. She had come stumbling in here, half-blinded by emotion. She hadn’t considered the possibility that the kitchen was already occupied.
What awful luck. It was Trig Boccardi, who lived next door to the Mellons. He had gone to high school with Sophie and Kelly, where he’d been the wrestling team’s star. His friends called him Trig, short for Trigonometry, the same way they might call a fat boy “Slim.”
He’d always been slow, but Kelly always wondered if he might have found himself in one headlock too many, because by the time he had gotten out of high school he was downright weird.
And he’d carried a torch for Sophie for about fifteen years now, although she’d never given him a single ounce of encouragement. The day Sophie’s wedding fell through, Trig had been so angry with Tom that they’d had to call a doctor to sedate him.
She’d never been comfortable around him, but she tried to compose her features. “What do you mean, Trig? Stay away from what one?”
“It’s not safe to be with any of them now,” he said, and the flat warning in his voice made her skin crawl. He frequently didn’t quite make sense. Was this just another of those times?
He still wore his sandy-brown hair in the buzz cut the wrestling coach had required and his muscles were still cut sharp and powerful, as if he thought he might be called on to throw down a few opponents on the mat at any moment.
“People have to pay for their sins,” he said. “And you’d better stay away from him. He’s dangerous when he’s angry. He’ll make you pay.”
Usually she tried to be pleasant to Trig when she encountered him, but today she’d had enough. Today she had nothing left.
“Who?” Her voice was sharp. “Who is dangerous? Who will make me pay?”
Trig rolled his eyes upward.
“Someone upstairs? Who? Do you mean Jacob? Do you mean Tom?”
Trig shook his head slowly. “I mean God.”
WHEN JACOB WAS SUFFICIENTLY talked out and liquored up, which took about three hours, he collapsed into a deep, noisy sleep. And then, wishing he could do the same, Tom went back downstairs.
Everyone was long gone, the house straightened up to perfection. All that remained was a refrigerator full of plastic-covered food and a note from Kelly that read simply “Jacob’s friend Joe will be coming over at nine. I’d appreciate it if you can stay till then. If you can’t, please call me.” And then her telephone number.
It was eight o’clock already. And he didn’t have anywhere to go—just an empty hotel room that he hadn’t even checked into yet. So why not stay?
He started to throw away the note, but he changed his mind and pocketed it instead. He didn’t delude himself. He liked knowing he had her number, even though he’d be a damn fool if he ever called it.
Fresh air. That’s what he needed. Jacob’s pain had filled that bedroom like a poisonous gas, and Tom had been breathing it for hours now. He didn’t know how Jacob had survived the past four days, with nothing but agony for air.
Just one more reason never to get married. Tom had been keeping a list for a decade—and he was up in the hundreds now.
The backyard garden of the Griggs’ house was beautiful, but right now Tom needed open spaces with no walls. He made himself a cup of coffee and went out front to drink it.
He plopped down on the stoop, undoubtedly verboten in a swank neighborhood like this, but so what? He put the coffee on the step below him, between his feet, and stared out into the cool, clear evening.
He liked autumn in Georgia. He liked the crisp little silver stars, swimming in the black sky like minnows. He liked the breeze in the Chinese elm, which hadn’t lost its leaves yet. He liked the smell of wood fires burning in nearby houses.
He shut his eyes. Several streets over, someone’s dog was barking. The sound echoed on the sides of hills three miles away, and the dog must have enjoyed that, because he kept barking. Maybe he imagined he was a wolf.
After ten minutes or so, when the coffee was drained, Tom felt better. His head had cleared enough that he could think.
And the first thing he thought of was Kelly.
On the surface, she hadn’t changed much at all. Still skinny and unaffected, still not quite sure how to control her long, curly hair. Still an honest look in those wide blue eyes, and a vulnerable bow at the top of those full, pink lips. Still about ten times sexier than she had any idea she was.
But on the inside, things had definitely changed.
For one thing, she didn’t love him anymore.
He heard footsteps coming down the sidewalk, not uncommon at eight-thirty in a safe, comfortable neighborhood. He wondered if Kelly was coming back to check on him, to see if he’d stayed as she’d asked.
But it was Samantha Mellon, Sophie’s little sister. He felt his muscles brace. He’d seen Sam scurrying out of Jacob’s house today the minute she’d laid eyes on Tom. He assumed that meant she didn’t trust herself to be polite.
So if she was coming back now, it must mean she’d decided it was time for a little therapeutic rudeness. He climbed down the stairs, down the front walk, hoping he could meet her on the sidewalk. She might get noisy—she had every right to. The important thing was not to wake Jacob.
To his surprise, when she saw him her steps quickened. She reached him with hands outstretched. “Tom!”
He allowed her to take his hands into hers. This wasn’t what he’d expected, but he certainly wasn’t going to complain if she’d decided not to claw his eyes out.
“Hey, Sam,” he said, smiling. “I hardly recognized you, kiddo. You’ve really grown up.”
Her pretty smile faded. “Yes. I look like Sophie now. Everyone tells me so. Does it—does it make you uncomfortable?”
He laughed. This was really strange. But kind of refreshing. Was it possible she was willing to discuss Sophie openly? He wouldn’t do it, of course, but it was a novel feeling to think he could.
“Of course not,” he said. “Sophie was beautiful. And so are you.”
“Thank you.” She squeezed his hands. “I’m so sorry, Tom. I shouldn’t have avoided you earlier. It’s been so long, and I wanted so much to talk to you. I just didn’t know how to begin.”
“Well, you’re off to a good start. What did you want to talk about?”
She didn’t answer right away. In the moonlight it was difficult to tell, but he thought maybe she was flushing.
“I—I think I just wanted you to know that, in spite of what Mother and Sebastian may have said, not everyone in our family hates you.”
He smiled. “I think that just leaves you, doesn’t it? But I appreciate it, Sam. It’s generous of you.”
She shook her head. “It’s not. It’s merely the truth. I don’t know why you didn’t marry Sophie, but I do know that we’re—” She bit her lower lip, as if she couldn’t think of the perfect word. “Mellons aren’t easy people. And look at Sophie—she can’t even live on her own. She’s not stable, and she never was, not really. So how could you have brought yourself to marry her? I wanted you to know I don’t blame you.”
Now he was the one who didn’t know what to say. He felt as if he’d just received a papal blessing—a blessing he hadn’t asked for and didn’t deserve. “Sam, I’m sorry. I appreciate what you’re saying, but this really isn’t something I’m comfortable talking about.”
She tilted her head to get a better look at him. “Not even to me?”
“Not even to you.”
“I see.” She dropped his hands slowly. “Of course, I understand. I probably shouldn’t have come all the way out here, bothering you when obviously you’re tired.”
“It’s all right, Sam. I’m glad you came. It was good to see you again.”
She still looked slightly crestfallen. He wondered what kind of reception she’d been expecting. Had she thought he would go down on his knees and thank her for the absolution? She must know that the only one who had the right to “forgive” him was Sophie herself. And that wasn’t likely to happen.
She must also know that, in the past ten years, he’d found a way to stop tormenting himself about all of this. He was quite contented now to carry on unforgiven.
But instead she seemed to feel oddly rejected.
“Well, I should go home, anyway,” she said. “Mother will be wondering where I am. I’m the only one she has left now, you know. She gets possessive. It’s…it’s pretty hard.”
“Sam—”
She laughed, a little too loudly. He instinctively glanced toward Jacob’s window, hoping he wouldn’t hear.
“I didn’t mean to whine,” Samantha said. “It’s not that bad, and I remember how you hate melodrama. Sophie told me about that—she said she would have to learn to control herself because emotion irritated you.”
Had he said that? Probably he had. Sophie’s broad, unpredictable and, to his view, overindulged emotions had annoyed the hell out of him. She’d cried for hours, and he hadn’t felt a thing. But perversely, when Kelly had wept in his arms, every tear had been a little drop of fire.
What a bastard he’d been.
Correction. What a bastard he still was.
Just ask Darlene, who had been crying on the telephone this morning. Knowing she could go on for hours, he’d set the phone on the bed and continued packing. When he came back, she’d been gone.
“Sam, look—”
“No, it’s all right, really. I still don’t blame you.” She seemed to be trying to find some middle ground between the eager welcome she’d started with and the uptight formality she’d briefly switched to. It obviously wasn’t easy for her to find the right note. In the end, they didn’t actually know each other very well, in spite of the fact that they’d come within twelve hours of being in-laws.
“I just want to ask you one thing, Tom, and then I’ll go. It’s important. Have you seen Sophie lately? Do you know where she is?”
“Where she is?” Tom frowned. “I thought she was either…in residence somewhere, or at home. Isn’t that the case?”
“Usually. But—” She ran her fingers through her hair. “We don’t know where she is right now. Mother called the clinic in Raleigh, but Sophie is just a voluntary patient, and apparently she checked herself out. She said she was coming home.”
“But she didn’t?”
“No. At least—”
A leaf skittered past. Samantha glanced behind her, as if she expected to see Sophie walking toward them. For some strange reason, the gesture made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“No, she didn’t come home. We’re not making this public, but Mother and I haven’t heard from her in weeks. And we need to find her. Mother is… She’s…” She reached up and began playing nervously with the buttons on her shirt. “Oh, you don’t care about all this.”
“Yes, I do. What about your mother?”
She looked at him with huge eyes, her fingers still picking at the top button. “She just found out she’s dying. It’s a brain tumor. Inoperable. Funny, I always thought that word was just too cliché. But it really means something. It means there’s no hope.”
“Oh, my God. Sam, I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t. She was terrible to you. She’s terrible to everyone. I’m the only one left now, though, and so I get it all.”
For a minute he thought Samantha might cry, too. She deserved to cry, with everything she’d been through—and all the heartbreak that undoubtedly lay ahead, as she nursed a dying mother.
But why bring her tears to him? Did she have no friends, no lover, no intimate of any kind? Surely she hadn’t kept her emotions bottled up for ten full years, waiting for him to materialize and listen?
Or maybe she’d done exactly that. God, these irrationally emotional Mellons! He was sorry for her. No wonder she was on such an emotional seesaw. But frankly, he just didn’t know if he could take it right now. Being with Jacob had sapped him of any strength he had possessed when he’d arrived.
“Sam, I’m sorry, but it’s been a long day, and I think I’d better—”
“I know. You’re tired. I shouldn’t have come. But there’s something else I have to tell you. I hope—hope you’re not staying long in Cathedral Cove.”
“Why?”
“That sounded rude, didn’t it? I didn’t mean it to be. It’s just that Mother is— She’s not herself. There’s no telling what she might say if she ran into you. And Sebastian is here, too, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. But so what?”
She tried to smile, but she was opening and shutting that top button repetitively, as if she couldn’t convince herself she had properly fixed it. The overall effect was extremely odd.
“Well,” she said finally, “it’s just that…if you think Mother hates you, you should hear the names Sebastian calls you.”
Tom stifled a yawn. Sebastian Mellon didn’t frighten him in the least. In fact, it might feel wonderful just to take the gloves off and have it out with that effete snob once and for all.
“I’d love to,” he said. “Send him over.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“BRIAN, STOP. I’d like to drive by Jacob’s house one more time, just to be sure he didn’t end up all alone.”
Kelly’s ex-husband, who was giving her a lift home from the dealership, where she’d just deposited her car for service—no one who knew Lillith was likely to postpone routine maintenance anymore—made an annoyed sound.
Even so, he obediently slowed the car and signaled for a right-hand turn.
“What’s the problem?” He glanced over at her. “I thought you said Beckham was keeping an eye on Jacob.”
“I think he is, but I just want to be sure. Tom is—” She was silent a moment, watching the commercial buildings give way to masonry cottages, and then to elegant brick houses with wide, well-manicured lawns. Jacob and Lillith had been able to buy in one of the best Cathedral Cove neighborhoods. Not the truly elite old-money enclave by the river, where the Mellons still reigned, but close enough.
“Tom is what?” Brian sounded grumpy. He had moved to Cathedral Cove and opened up his sporting-goods store only about six years ago, and, like many newcomers, he seemed to think the story of Sophie’s wedding was about seventy-five percent trashy fiction.
And even if it was true, his sympathies naturally lay with Tom Beckham—one, because Tom was just a regular guy, comparatively speaking, and two, because everyone knew those Mellons were a bunch of inbred freaks.
Kelly sighed. “Well, after what he did to Soph—”
“It was ten years ago, for God’s sake,” Brian broke in. “You don’t know what the guy is anymore.”
“Exactly,” she agreed, not in the mood to fight. Besides, Brian’s down-to-earth practicality had always been his most appealing quality. She had felt very comfortable, very safe, in the two years of their marriage. “He’s an unknown quantity. That’s why I want to check.”
“Fine. We’ll check.”
But when they got to Jacob’s street, she could immediately see Tom’s expensive silver sedan in the driveway. She knew it was his because it had been the only car remaining on the street when she had left Jacob’s house after doing the dishes. Also, it had Atlanta license plates, and it just screamed overpaid big-city lawyer.
Tom must have pulled it into the driveway sometime after she’d gone. That had a settled-in feeling, and she relaxed a little. Jacob was probably fine for tonight.
“I guess Tom did stay,” she said softly. “Good for him.”
“Of course he did,” Brian said. “Guys don’t walk out on their buddies.”
She glanced at him with a wry smile. “Just on their women? Well, you should know.”
“That’s right,” he responded archly, and she could see the white of his teeth as he grinned in the darkness. “Especially if their women are cold-hearted bitches.”
She chuckled. This was an old joke with them, as comfortable now as a well-worn sweater. After two years of a pleasant but fire-free marriage, Brian had confessed that he’d fallen in love with Marie Eller, his lovely, loyal accountant. Kelly had been sad but not quite heartbroken. She knew Brian deserved a passion she simply didn’t feel—and apparently Marie could give him that.
What she’d told Tom today was true. She and Brian had divorced without acrimony, and they’d never stopped being friends.
In fact, right now Marie was the one who was giving Brian a hard time. Last month, she had asked him to move out, telling him she needed “space” and time to think. He was pretty upset, but handling it in his usual sensible way, working hard and hoping for the best.
“Okay, boss-lady, now where? Shall we do the official Sophie’s Wedding World Tour? We’ve checked on the runaway groom. Shall we go by the House of Usher and see how the rest of the weirdos are doing?”
Kelly had heard people call Coeur Volé “the House of Usher” before. She supposed it was inevitable. The Mellons were reclusive, the structure was Gothic and Sophie’s story offered such great fodder for the imagination. But it always seemed a bit cruel to her. It made a joke of things that she knew weren’t funny.
But she decided to ignore it. He didn’t mean anything, really. The working class always bashed the snobbish old guard. She’d done it herself, before Sophie had picked her for a friend.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough drama for one day. Did I tell you Samantha came by to see Jacob? She wasn’t at the service, but she stopped in at the house afterward.”
“Yeah? Did she bring her crazy brother?”
Kelly settled onto the truck’s sensible cloth seats and shut her eyes. Brian had owned this pickup ever since she first met him, and the familiar smell and rhythmic rocking were relaxing.
“You mean Sebastian?” She shook her head sleepily. “No, Sebastian lives somewhere in North Carolina. He’s not even in town.”
“Yes, he is.”
She opened her eyes. “What are you talking about? Sebastian is back in Cathedral Cove? How do you know that?”
“I saw him. Today, in the store. I sold him a hunting knife and a pair of sneakers. Too bad he didn’t want to buy a gun. I would have loved to do a background check on that one. I’ll bet we’d find that he’s been in more loony bins than his sister.”
She sat up straight. “Sebastian is back?”
“That’s what I said, like three times now.” He cut a quick glance her way. “What’s wrong with that? He’s weird, but no weirder than the rest of them.”
“But…” She felt a tightness in the pit of her stomach. What a coincidence that Sebastian should come home right now, just when Lillith died, just when Tom showed up for the first time in ten years.
And Lillith had told Kelly that Sophie was back, too. If all of it was true, this would be the first time the whole Mellon family—and Tom Beckham—had been in Cathedral Cove together since the wedding.
She braided her fingers in her lap. It just didn’t feel right. It felt downright unnatural, as disturbing as if she had looked up and seen the stars crawling out of their prescribed places, sliding slowly into some new, mysterious configuration.
Could this be what Trig had meant when he’d said, “He’s dangerous when he’s angry”? Could he have meant Sebastian? Kelly had seen Sebastian angry only a few times during their teenage years, but it had been a sight to remember. Trig, living next door, might have seen even more.
Was it possible that, in his foggy, incoherent way, Trig had been trying to tell her something important?
“Talk to me, Kel. What’s the big deal about Sebastian being home?”
She tried to focus, to articulate her vague anxieties. “It’s just that…if Sebastian’s here, and Tom’s here…” She paused. “I wonder if he knows Tom’s here?”
“So what if he does? You think Sebastian will hunt down Tom Beckham and kick his ass for what he did to sister Sophie ten years ago? Cripes, will you people ever let that damn story go? It’s over, for God’s sake. Get a grip.”
She told herself that Brian probably was right. Even lava-hot emotions could do a lot of cooling down in a decade. At the time of the jilting, Sebastian had been very defensive for Sophie. But though Sebastian and Sophie had been inseparable as young people, they must have grown apart through these past few years.
Sophie had spent so much time in institutions. And Sebastian, Kelly had heard, had married out in Raleigh. He had children and a career, stockbroker or something. Obviously, at least to some degree, he had moved on.
They were nearing the Mellon house now. She could see the tower from here. It was completely dark tonight. But that didn’t mean it was empty, only that the lights were out. She shivered, thinking of someone standing up there, in the shadows, looking down.
How much could you see from there?
Could you see the foot of the East River Bridge?
“Brian,” she said suddenly. “Will you sleep at my place tonight? I’ve put a bed in the guest room, so you wouldn’t have to take the sofa.”
He tilted his head, smiling. “Spooky old dump finally starting to give you the creeps?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s just that—”
She thought of the waiting, silent trees around her studio. She thought of Lillith’s face covered in blood, and Trig standing in Jacob’s kitchen, talking cryptically about God and danger.
To heck with saving face. Tomorrow she’d be strong. Tonight she needed a friend. “Yes.”
Brian drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Well…. Marie won’t like it.”
“Oh.” She tried to control her disappointment. But the idea of being out there alone tonight, with no car… “Never mind, then. I wouldn’t want to cause trouble between you two. If you think you shouldn’t—”
“I never said that. I just said Marie wouldn’t like it. Maybe that’s a good thing.” He waggled his eyebrows. “A little jealousy might be exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“Thanks,” she said, almost ashamed of the relief that coursed through her. She definitely had to get back to being tough tomorrow. “I appreciate it, Brian. I really do.”
She turned her head and stared out the window. They were approaching the spot where Lillith had hit the tree. In a minute they would have to cross the East River Bridge, over to the area unofficially known as the “Left Bank.” Over there, the houses were smaller, funkier, just starting to come back from a long economic down-slide.
Tight zoning was a luxury the Left Bank couldn’t afford. Artsy yuppie condos were haphazardly mixed in with coffee shops, antiques mini-marts and New Age candle boutiques. Beyond the Left Bank lay the rural fringes, where your neighbors were mostly trees, or people who owned guns and horses and dogs named Zeke.
It was out there that Kelly had bought her new place, a surprisingly charming run-down cottage with a detached garage that made the perfect studio. So though she definitely lived, in Cathedral Cove parlance, far, far on “the wrong side of the bridge,” she loved it. Most of the time.
Just not tonight.
“Look,” Brian said. “Someone has already put up a marker for Lillith.”
Kelly saw it at the same time. On the side of the road, just a couple of feet from the tree, a waist-high circular sign stood, announcing to all passersby that tragedy had visited this spot.
Through the years, she’d seen a hundred roadside markers just like this one. But they had always seemed comfortably impersonal, just small, circular plaques that said Drive Carefully, sometimes decorated with crosses, sometimes with flowers, depending on how recent the accident had been. She had always driven by without much more than a generic whisper of sympathy.
But this one was different. She wondered who had put it there. It hadn’t been there this morning.
Jacob hadn’t been in any shape to think of such a gesture. Someone had, though. At least four arrangements of flowers clustered on and around it—and an elaborate floral wreath had been hooked over the top of the sign, like a crown or a halo.
And there was something else. Was it a ribbon? There was very little wind tonight, and yet the thing—was it fabric?—was fluttering oddly, so light it seemed to defy gravity.
She squinted. What was that, draped over the left side of the wreath, undulating, as if it were alive and trying to get her attention?
It looked almost like a streamer of fog, or moss…or…
Something cold gathered around her heart. No, it couldn’t be that.
The breeze was playing with it.
“Brian, stop,” she cried.
He sighed even as he put on the brakes.
“Now what? Come on, Kel, I’m tired. Whatever it is, can’t it wait until—”
But she had already opened the car door and climbed out. She couldn’t hear the end of his sentence.
She walked over to the marker and took the soft, fluttering, weightless scrap into her numb hands. She turned it over. She traced its familiar, exquisite pattern with disbelieving fingers.
It wasn’t fog or moss. It was exactly what she had thought it was.
It was a piece of lace from Sophie Mellon’s wedding dress.
MARY JO’S CAFÉ AND SWEET SHOP was charming from the street side, all hanging baskets of red geraniums, green awnings and shiny black wrought-iron tables and chairs.
But from the alley out back, it looked like any other strip retail business, just a no-frills utility door, an over-filled Dumpster, a teetering stack of wet wooden palettes and an empty plastic bag bumping up against the wall, shoved around by the wind.
Kelly pulled into the dead-end alley, did an automatic three-point turn to leave her minivan facing out and then cut the engine. Here under the trees, it was cool and damp and dirty. The twilight was a mournful blue.
She suddenly wished she’d put this chore first on her list today, not last.
But she had to stop this foolishness. She wasn’t by nature a coward, though she certainly had been acting like one ever since Lillith’s death.
Like last night. Asking Brian to stay had been ridiculous. He had sacked out in the guest room, exhausted from his own long day, the minute they got to Kelly’s place. She’d spent another several hours in the studio, working, essentially alone anyhow.
Still, it had been nice to know another human being was nearby.
He’d taken her to get her van as soon as the dealership had called, and then, as pleasantly as ever, they’d gone their separate ways. They’d both had a million things to do.
Now she was tired. But Kelly had promised Mary Jo she’d return all the café trays they’d used for the funeral food, so, in spite of the eerie blue shadows in the alley, she had to do it.
The café was still open—it would be serving dinner till ten—but most of the other stores on the street were already closed. The only two cars in the alley were Mary Jo’s Honda and Kelly’s minivan, which wasn’t glamorous but was convenient for transporting the big sheets of stained glass she needed for special projects.
Kelly had called ahead, so Mary Jo was waiting for her at the utility door. They unloaded the trays efficiently without much chatter and stacked them in the café’s kitchen.
“Thanks for bringing the stuff back,” Mary Jo said as she walked Kelly to the van. “I can use it tonight. You know what weekends are like.”
Kelly nodded. And they walked the rest of the way in silence. Apparently Mary Jo didn’t feel like making small talk any more than she did.
Maybe Mary Jo realized, just as Kelly had, that handling the funeral food had been the last little chore they’d ever do for Lillith.
After the accident, the first day or two had brought a mercifully numb shock. After that, the details of the funeral had been hectic and distracting.
But now it was over. Life went on. And they had to face that it went on without Lillith.
When they got to the van, Mary Jo hugged her. “Did you get that starter looked at?”
Kelly smiled. “Yeah. Transmission needed work, too. Two thousand dollars altogether. But at least it starts right up.”
“Ouch.” Mary Jo grimaced. “Well. Take care.”
“I will.” Kelly watched as Mary Jo turned and walked slowly back to the store. She didn’t look as if she had enough energy to get to the door, much less shepherd her café through the dinner rush. Tragedy had so many repercussions, big and small.
“Oh—wait—” Kelly said suddenly. “I meant to ask you. Have you heard anything about Sophie being back in town?”
Mary Jo turned. She shook her head. “No. Dale over at the Texaco came in for lunch today, and he said he’d seen Sebastian, which surprised me. It’s been a couple of years since the Mellon heir graced us with his presence, hasn’t it? But Sophie? No. As far as I know she’s still an inpatient.”
Kelly thought about mentioning what Lily had said, but decided against it. And there wasn’t any point asking Mary Jo about the scrap of lace. Mary Jo hadn’t been a member of the wedding party, so she would never have seen Sophie’s dress anyhow.
So Kelly just said goodbye again and watched Mary Jo go back inside. Then she opened the door of her van, eager to get out of this alley now that she was alone. Something was rummaging behind the Dumpster, but Kelly couldn’t see what. The limp blue twilight had lost its struggle with darkness. Only small patches of light lay between long, black stretches of shadow.
Definitely time to go. Besides, if she went straight home now, she could put in a good four hours on the wine-shop project, which was falling seriously behind.
But darn it. Down at the front end of the alley, a large refrigeration truck had pulled in, blocking the exit. Behind her, the alley came to a dead end, so she’d have to wait.
Maybe the driver would make his delivery quickly. In the meantime, she could at least check on the glass in the back. With her keys still in her hand, she circled the van and opened the hatch doors.
She’d had special slots installed in the cargo area so that she could transport sheets of glass safely. Today, all the slots were filled.
The wine-shop project was the most challenging commission she’d ever landed—a tunnellike entryway for the upscale establishment, with lush stained-glass grapevines winding on both sides, and even on the ceiling.
This afternoon she’d picked out half a dozen sheets of the most beautiful green full-antique glass. It had cost a fortune, virtually eliminating any hope that this project would turn a profit. But the glass had such extraordinary linear striations, which would produce grape leaves so textured and real no customer would walk through that entryway without reaching out to touch them.
She hadn’t been able to resist. Anyhow, if this project turned out to look as spectacular as she hoped, it would be worth its weight in permanent advertising.
She adjusted a couple of boxes so that everything was wedged in snugly, and then, hearing an odd noise behind her, she turned.
Trig Boccardi was standing only about four feet behind the truck, a glower on his heavy face, erasing what little good looks he had left from his high-school glory.
Unnerved, Kelly glanced around. Mary Jo’s café was the last store at the dead end. Unless he had climbed over the alley fence, or come out of the café kitchen, he had pretty much materialized out of thin air.
“Hi, Trig,” she said neutrally. She whisked shut the van’s cargo doors. She didn’t like to have those pricy sheets of glass exposed to anyone as unpredictable as Trig. “Where’d you come from? You startled me.”
“You took it.” Trig’s brows hung low over his eyes. “Didn’t you?”
She didn’t like his tone, which was strangely aggressive. And, as usual, he wasn’t making sense. “I don’t know what you mean. Took what?”
“The lace. You took the lace from the wreath. Don’t pretend you didn’t. I saw you do it.”
Kelly’s stomach tightened. He had seen her? He had been watching her? From where? No wonder she’d had such a creepy feeling about spending the night alone.
How often did he do that?
“Yes,” she said. “I took it.”
“You shouldn’t have. It’s not yours.”
She glanced toward the front of the alley. The refrigeration truck was still there. But that wasn’t all bad. It meant that somewhere nearby was a truck driver, too. Just in case.
And Mary Jo was just inside the café. She’d come out if she had any idea something was wrong. Kelly began to move around the van a little, toward the driver’s side. Toward the horn.
“You shouldn’t have taken it,” he repeated. He had followed her all the way around, still staring intently.
“Why not?” She paused by the door, wishing she’d left the window open so she could just reach in and touch the horn. She tried to read his expression, unsure whether he was very sad, or very angry—or maybe even a little frightened himself. “Did you put the lace there, Trig?”
He recoiled. “Of course not. She put it there.”
“She? Who?”
He blinked several times, always a sign that he was agitated. “You know who. It’s hers.” He advanced a step. “She’ll be mad that you took it.”
Behind her back, she began to rearrange her keys in the palm of her hand, so that the metal points stuck out between her fingers. Trig was big and muscular, but his thinking was slow, and she hoped his reflexes were, too.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. I was just surprised when I saw it, and I wasn’t thinking. Maybe I should put it back.”
He thrust out his hand. “I’ll put it back. You shouldn’t have taken it.”
Did he think she carried it with her everywhere she went? “I don’t have it with me,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, Trig. I’ll take care of it later.”
“No,” he said. He took another step, his head ducked low, like an animal who was considering an attack. She’d never appreciated how much like a bull he actually looked, with that bulky body and that triangular head.
The groan and grind of gears just ahead told her the truck was leaving. Taking advantage of the distraction, she pulled open the door and climbed quickly into the driver’s seat. Shutting herself in, she rolled down the window and looked sternly at Trig.
“I want you to go home now, Trig. And I want you to leave me alone.”
He put his hand on the door. “No,” he said harshly.
“Yes,” she said, putting her keys in the ignition and turning over the engine, which, thankfully, started right up. Suddenly the two thousand dollars she’d paid the dealership seemed like a bargain.
“You have to go home now. And listen to me, Trig. I don’t know why you were watching me the other night, but I want you to stop it. You can get in a lot of trouble for things like that.”
He frowned, backing away a couple of inches, as if her stern tone startled him. He shook his head, a jerky and uncoordinated denial.
“I wasn’t watching you,” he said thinly. He blinked several times. “I was watching her.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE NEXT MORNING Kelly sat at her studio’s semicircular work desk, heart-shaped pieces of glimmering green glass littering the countertops. It looked as if, sometime during the night, the ceiling had rained enchanted leaves.
But she wasn’t paying any attention to the freshly cut pieces, which were ready to be burnished with foil. Instead, she was listening to the ringing telephone crooked between her ear and her shoulder, and staring at a photograph she held awkwardly in her newly bandaged fingers.
She hardly noticed the bandages. She always sliced or burned herself while she was cutting and grinding small pieces. If nothing required stitches, she considered it a good day’s work.
Besides, the picture held all her attention. She hadn’t looked at it in years. It had been tucked carefully away in the pages of an old scrapbook. It was a picture of Sophie’s wedding party, taken the night of the rehearsal dinner.
No wonder she’d been reluctant to keep it where she could see it. It was as potent as an uncorked vial of magic smoke. Kelly found that she could remember every moment of that night, as if it had been yesterday.
Such vivid memories… The scratchy seams of her green dress, which had been a little too tight. The way they’d all laughed because the cello player was out of tune. The time Lillith had sprayed champagne through her nose when Kent Snyder told a vulgar joke.
She remembered it all, every emotion, right down to the deep, scraping ache in the hollow of her heart.
While the others had been laughing and drinking and playing silly games, Kelly had been counting the hours until Tom officially belonged to Sophie. Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two…
By the time the wedding party corralled a waiter and asked him to take this picture with Kelly’s disposable camera, it was one in the morning. Only seventeen hours until the wedding.
Looking down at those faces now, with all the bitter knowledge of hindsight, Kelly thought maybe she could detect the turmoil seething under the surface smiles.
Against her ear, the phone was still ringing. She hung up and dialed a second time, in case she’d made a mistake. As it began to ring again, she tilted the picture, to better catch the light.
Nine young people. It should have been ten, but Samantha, the maid of honor, had been only seventeen, too young to drink and dance and giggle the night away with the others. She’d been sent home with her parents hours before the picture was taken.
Which left just nine. Sophie and Tom, the bride and the groom. Sebastian, who was the best man. Three ushers— Kent Snyder, Bill Gaskins and Alex VanCamp. Three bridesmaids—Dolly, whose last name was now Tammaro, Lillith, and Kelly herself.
All young. All smiling. But how many of them, Kelly wondered, had been hiding something that night?
Kelly’s own sick guilt was fairly obvious, she thought. Her eyes looked shadowed, and she had her hands clasped in front of her, white-knuckled, almost as if the camera were a harsh deity from which she begged forgiveness.
Sebastian’s head was turned away from the camera, but his jaw was set at a stiff angle, and his shoulders were oddly braced. It was impossible to tell whether he was staring at Sophie or Tom.
Sophie looked gorgeous, of course, in her ice-blue party dress. But her smile was too bright, too fake, as if she were dramatically intoxicated, though Kelly remembered that Sophie had hardly touched her wine that night.
Dark-haired Lillith was making a kissy face, just as energetic and full of spunk then as she had been until the night she died.
Kelly shut her eyes briefly, unable to look at Lillith very long.
They were standing just as they had planned to stand the next day, lined up by height. Dolly, the shortest of the bridesmaids, was on the very end, holding up her dress, because she’d just caught her hem in her high heel and torn it. She was glaring over at Kent Snyder, who, Kelly remembered, had just made a rude joke about Dolly, the clumsy cow.
Kent had been very drunk. The photographer had caught him sticking his tongue out and holding up two fingers to make devil horns behind Bill Gaskins’s head.
Alex VanCamp looked bored. None of them had known Alex very well. He’d been a special friend of Sebastian’s from college, and he’d seemed as if he could have been interestingly dangerous, if he’d found them worth the trouble of leading astray. Dolly had flirted with him, to no avail.
Kelly remembered thinking how peculiar it was that no one in the wedding party seemed to be connected to Tom, not even his groomsmen. Should that have tipped them off? He had seemed like a stranger at his own wedding.
Which brought her, finally, to Tom’s handsome face.
This was the one face that should tell the whole story, and yet, even now, it didn’t. Gorgeous in his tux, he was smiling that familiar lopsided smile, and one of his eyebrows was arched, as if he found the whole thing entertaining, but unimportant.
He seemed unaware of Kelly, of course, though just thirty minutes before she’d been with him in a corner, crying, touching his face one last time. But then, in a weird way he seemed unaware of all of them, as if he were alone in the picture.
Sophie clung to his arm, her whole body yearning toward him. But his body wasn’t responding. Not a single muscle bent in her direction even a fraction of an inch.
Still, though any stranger could look at this picture and see that the bride was more in love than the groom, Kelly didn’t think anyone would guess that, less than seventeen hours later, the groom would disappear.
“Hello?”
Kelly dropped the photo, shocked to realize that someone had answered the telephone. It was a woman.
“Hi. My name is Kelly Ralston. I’m trying to locate Kent Snyder. Do you know if I have the right number?”
A pause stretched oddly. “Yes,” the woman said finally. “This is the right number.”
Kelly couldn’t believe her luck. She’d been trying all morning to reach any of the other members of the wedding party. She wasn’t sure why—just a vague sense that one of them might know something about the wedding lace she’d found on the roadside marker, whether it really was a match for Sophie’s gown.
But they’d all moved away. Only she and Lily had stayed in touch. Tracking even one of the others down had proved more difficult than Kelly had imagined.
Kelly wouldn’t have chosen to start her inquiries with the hard-drinking, slightly vulgar Kent Snyder. But she’d take what she could get. Though she’d left messages several places, this was her first breakthrough.
“Oh, good. I’m sorry to bother you, but Kent and I—” What could she say? They hadn’t been friends, exactly. She’d spent a lot of time with him for the week of wedding festivities, and then she’d never seen him again.
“Some years ago we were in a wedding together. I needed to get some information, and I thought perhaps he could help me. Is he there?”
“No,” the woman said. “Look, what did you say your name was?”
“Kelly Ralston.” Kelly thought the woman sounded edgy. Darn it. Kelly hoped she hadn’t stumbled into some kind of divorce tangle. “I was Kelly Carpenter at the time. We were both in Sophie Mellon’s wedding, ten years ago, in Cathedral Cove.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Kelly, but Kent is dead.”
Kelly was so surprised she couldn’t speak for a moment. Her glance fell on Kent’s picture. He had been a good-looking young man, in a thick-neck, not-very-bright sort of way. He’d been putting on weight even in his early twenties. His shirt was too tight, the buttons threatening to burst. And his face was already too red, flushed by alcohol.
“Kelly?” The woman on the telephone softened her voice, though she still sounded edgy. “I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock. It was to us, too. It was an accident. Two weeks ago.”
Kelly’s voice felt rusty, as if she’d been mute for hours, not seconds. “He had an accident? A car accident?”
“No, although God knows it’s a miracle he never did, the damn fool.” The woman cleared her throat. “It was a hunting accident. He must have stumbled. His gun went off.”
“I’m so sorry.” Kelly shut her eyes. “But are you sure? I mean, are you sure it was an accident?”
“I guess you didn’t know him all that well. I lived with him for eight years. I knew him inside and out. He was a good man, but he drank too much, no reason to sugarcoat it. He had no business handling a gun, the condition he was in, but there was no stopping him when he had his mind made up.”
Somehow Kelly got through the rest of the call, offering condolences and apologies for calling at such a terrible time. When she put the telephone down, her hands felt cold.
Strangely numb, she picked up one of her rich green-glass leaves and held it to the light. The striations really were lovely. She hoped she’d got all the veins “growing” in the right direction.
She remembered what her first stained-glass teacher had told her, all those years ago in the basement of the Mellon house. A gorgeous young French artist, Jean Laurent, had been hired to create a two-story St. George and the Dragon window to hang at the top of the Coeur Volé staircase.
Kelly and Sophie had both instantly fallen in love. But while Sophie lusted after the Frenchman’s black hair and bulging shoulders, Kelly had fallen in love with the glass. The shining green of the dragon’s scales, and the rich, glowing red of his bleeding heart, the twining vines and billowing clouds behind St. George’s triumphant sword.
Probably Jean had become Sophie’s lover. Kelly remembered odd absences, lingering glances. But he had also recognized Kelly’s passion and he had given her hours of his time.
When you cut your leaves, he showed her, or created your clouds, you couldn’t just pick the prettiest spot on your sheet of glass. You had to pick the one that followed the correct lines and rhythms of life.
Hair curled, leaves grew, shadows fell, and even dragons died, according to natural laws. Violate them in the glass, and the entire piece would always be vaguely unsatisfactory.
She picked up a second leaf, twirling it slowly in her bandaged fingers.
Natural laws.
She picked up the picture in her other hand. Two of those smiling people were dead now. Did that follow the laws of nature? Two of ten was twenty percent. If you took any random group of ten relatively intelligent, well-to-do twenty-somethings… Would twenty percent of them be dead within ten years?
The phone rang again.
She dropped the picture but held on to the two leaves. She clicked the talk button.
“Hello.”
“Is this Kelly Ralston?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Phil Tammaro.”
At first Kelly didn’t recognize the name. Tammaro? Did she know anyone named Tammaro?
“I’m Dolly’s husband.”
Oh, of course. She’d left a message there, after she’d finally tracked Dolly down through three completely different marriages, names and addresses.
“Yes,” she said, eager to make up for not remembering. “Yes, Phil, thank you for calling me back.”
“I just came in. I heard your message. I thought I’d better tell you—”
His voice broke, and at the sound Kelly’s heart stopped.
“—tell you about Dolly. You see, Dolly was in an accident. She—she’s dead.”
TOM HAD BEEN LOOKING for Jacob more than an hour before it occurred to him to check the cemetery.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning, still warm but with a crisp hint of fall. After the funeral, Jacob had asked Tom to stay in Cathedral Cove a few days. Jacob didn’t need to be alone right now, and since Tom wasn’t eager to get back to the whole stupid Coach O’Toole mess—not to mention the phone messages that would be waiting from an injured Darlene—he’d said yes.
He’d let his office know he was taking a week of vacation time, which hadn’t gone down well with Bailey, but so what? Every vacation Tom had taken for the past five years had been a working trip, schmoozing some potential client or attending some business conference. They owed him.
Besides, there wasn’t really any such thing as “getting away” if you had a cell phone and a laptop.
Yesterday, Jacob had slept late, so Tom had spent all morning answering e-mails, issuing instructions to his paralegal and hand-holding a couple of clients who wanted to know why you had to notify everyone on the planet before you set a court date for a hearing.
He assumed today would be the same. This morning, though, by the time he got off the phone, Jacob was gone. And he’d left his cell phone behind, which seemed to hint that he’d like to be alone.
It had been a sticky moment. Tom didn’t want to crowd Jacob, who was free to go wherever he wanted. Tom wasn’t exactly the prison warden. But still…though Jacob seemed to be pulling himself together a little, it had been only a week since his wife had died. He was still fragile enough that Tom would rather keep an eye on him.
Finally, just when Tom was starting to admit he was worried, he spotted Jacob’s car. It was pulled off the road, near the entrance to Edgewater Memorial Gardens.
Great. Just perfect. Tom felt for Jacob, really he did. Losing Lillith had put the man through sheer hell. But to tell the truth, Tom had endured all the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing he could take for a while.
This definitely wasn’t how he handled his own challenges. His personal recipe for emotional recovery was a fourteen-hour workday followed by a run of maybe ten miles, or fifteen, or whatever it took to wear out every muscle and brain cell he had.
Cemeteries were for wallowing, and he didn’t wallow. His own parents, who had died when he was in college, had been cremated and scattered at sea. Clean and sensible. No desolate angels clinging to crosses, no granite effigies, no gut-wrenching epitaphs. No tilted, weed-covered tombstones and withered flowers to remind you that, in the end, even love gets tired of grief and forgets to mourn.
But what could he do? He couldn’t exactly call Jacob’s friend Joe and say, Hey, could you go get him? He’s in the cemetery, and I don’t do cemeteries.
So, indulging himself in one heavy sigh, he parked his car and began walking around, looking for Jacob.
This particular cemetery was a pleasant surprise. It was restrained, with no marble explosions of showy grief. Just neat rows of well-tended headstones, and comfortable benches under apple trees and spreading oaks.
For a cemetery, it seemed strangely full of life. The trees were restless with chattering squirrels and noisy birds, and ahead of him on the path a young couple walked slowly hand in hand, as if this were just another pretty park.
Off to his right, toward the river, a funeral service was in progress. A soft blue tent held a dozen mourners and a priest. The priest smiled at him as he passed. Smiling back seemed strange, so Tom merely nodded and walked on.
To his left, where the cemetery blended comfortably into a neighborhood of old, charming, well-kept houses, Tom saw three little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, playing among the trees. One girl had a sword made of an apple branch, and the other two wore crowns of tinfoil and Shasta daisies.
Jacob sat on a bench very near the children, though he faced the other direction. Tom braced himself, took another deep breath, sat on the bench beside him.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You had me a little worried there.”
Jacob looked over at him. Just as Tom had feared, Jacob had been crying. But for the moment, at least, his red eyes were dry.
“Sorry,” Jacob said. “I just felt like I had to come see her.”
Tom glanced over at the lawn. Though he could tell where the freshly dug grave was, he saw no headstone. Of course not, he thought. It wasn’t ready yet.
“I haven’t even decided what it should say.” Jacob had followed Tom’s glance. “We never talked about it. You don’t think of things like that, not at our age.”
“No,” Tom said. “Of course you don’t.”
“We had wills, of course,” Jacob went on. “We were lawyers. We took care of that. We thought of everything. But we didn’t for a minute think we’d ever need them.”
“No,” Tom said. For an uncomfortable moment, he imagined his own neatly typed will, duly notarized and filed. Everything went to charity. Everything, right down to the pictures on his walls and the ties on his rack. It was the will of a completely unencumbered man.
But here, next to Jacob’s aching grief, in the presence of all these dearly departed, Tom realized how pathetic his will would sound when it was read. Like the antiseptic record of a thoroughly unlived life.
Maybe, he thought impulsively, he’d go back and change it. Maybe he’d leave a few things to Jacob, who was the closest thing to a real friend he’d had since elementary school. Tom also had a painting of a red-haired girl standing on a hillside. It was worth a great deal of money, but he knew he’d bought it only because it reminded him of Kelly. Maybe he’d go back and write in a clause leaving it to her. She’d be pretty shocked, wouldn’t she?
“I wish I had fixed the damn brakes myself,” Jacob said suddenly.
Tom looked over at him. “What?”
“Lillith’s brakes. She needed to have the whole system fixed. Everything was leaking. She had to put brake fluid in every few days. I was always carping at her, telling her to just bite the bullet and get it taken care of.”
“But she didn’t?”
Jacob shook his head. “She hated stuff like that. Boring stuff. I knew she hated it. All that time I spent, bitching about how she was letting it go. Why didn’t I just do it?”
Tom didn’t answer. He knew Jacob didn’t expect him to. There was no answer. Jacob hadn’t fixed Lillith’s brakes, and he was just going to have to live with that.
The fact that Lillith would undoubtedly be happy to forgive him didn’t make much difference. Jacob had to learn to forgive himself. If he could.
Sometimes, Tom knew, you couldn’t. Sometimes life’s lemons just couldn’t be turned into lemonade, no matter how hard you tried to squeeze the facts.
Oh, yeah. Tom knew all about that.
The sound of the girls squealing and laughing was closer now. Apparently they were in the middle of a war, with pinecones for cannonballs. One of them had just ricocheted off the branch above Tom’s head, and suddenly another came sailing over and caught Jacob in the shoulder.
“Oh,” the young, high voices said, still giggling, “oh, shit!”
Two of the children disappeared behind tree trunks, but the girl who had thrown the pinecone came over, dragging her sword behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am Sir Lancelot, and I’m trying to rescue Guinevere. I’m not very accurate.”
Jacob smiled. “That’s okay. You throw good and hard. When you fix your aim, you’ll be lethal.”
She smiled at him, retrieved her pinecone, and ran back down the hill toward her buddies. Their daisy crowns could just be seen peeking around the edges of the massive trees.
Jacob looked at Tom. He almost smiled. Then he looked down at his hands.
“I would have liked to have children,” he said.
“I know.” Tom wondered if he should add the conventional statements, like you would make a terrific father, or you will someday. But all those things sounded hollow. Jacob had lost so much. Tom’s instincts told him not to try to minimize that loss.
“What about you?” Jacob glanced up at Tom briefly, then went back to staring at his hands.
“Me? What about me?”
“Don’t you ever want to get married? Don’t you want to have kids?”
Tom shifted on the bench. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes it seems that ship has sailed, you know? There’s not a lot of time, and I haven’t really met anyone I—”
“Is it because of Sophie?”
Tom gave Jacob a hard look. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” He took a deep breath. “Darn it, I know this subject is supposed to be off-limits. Always has been. I can feel it every time I get even close. But I’ve just learned a lot about how short life can be, you know?”
Tom didn’t answer.
“Well, it is,” Jacob went on doggedly. “And so it’s stupid to avoid talking about things that matter. If I had Lillith back, you know what I’d do? I’d spend every minute just talking to her. Just telling her how I feel, and finding out what matters to her. I’d never go to an office again.”
Tom tried to chuckle. “That might be a little hard on the budget.”
“Screw the budget.” Jacob shook his head. “We’ve got enough money. Why did we think there should always be more?”
Tom was silent a moment. The priest’s voice drifted sonorously over the gentle air, reaching them as pure feeling, no content. The feeling was peace. Comfort. Forgiveness.
For that one moment, Tom could almost believe such things existed, even for people like him. After all, it must be for people like him that the concept had been invented. If you’d never done anything bad, you wouldn’t need forgiveness, would you?
“I guess it is partly Sophie,” Tom said. “I came so close to making a terrible mistake. I loathe the idea of making another one.”
Jacob nodded. “I can see that.” He paused, and Tom could tell he was trying to decide how far to push. “Did you—did you ever love her in the first place?”
“Jacob,” Tom said. “I’m not going to do this.”
“I guess that’s my answer.” Jacob sighed. “Have you ever been in love with anybody?”
Tom tapped his foot, a small movement that barely disturbed the yellow leaves that had fallen into the mulch around the bench. Though the cemetery was wide and open, the breezes fresh, he had begun to feel claustrophobic.
Had he ever been in love? What kind of question was that? For a few days, ten years ago, he’d been obsessed with Kelly Carpenter. He had hungered for her like an animal. When he’d looked at her, he’d felt as if someone had tied his intestines into knots and beaten his chest with a mallet.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kathleen-o-brien/happily-never-after-39878096/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Kathleen O'Brien
Members of the wedding party are starting to die.No one could believe that Thomas Beckham was the kind of man to leave a woman at the altar, but he couldn't marry his bride-to-be. Not after what he'd seen her do. His only choice was to leave and never look back–and to keep to himself everything he'd witnessed.After the wedding-that-wasn't, everyone, including Kelly Ralston, went on to other things. Or so it had always seemed. But ten years later, Kelly finds herself attending the funeral of another one of the bridesmaids–the third member of the wedding party to meet a tragic death. Kelly can't help but wonder if the deaths are a coincidence. Or are they linked? If so, who will be targeted next?Thomas Beckham may be her only chance to find the killer. Before the killer finds her…
“Tom? Are you there? It’s Kelly.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
Tom understood that something must have happened. Something bad. Kelly hadn’t called him in ten years, though at first he had deluded himself that she might.
“I don’t know if you heard about Lillith Griggs. I mean, she became Lillith Griggs—you knew she and Jacob got married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that.” He and Jacob still kept in touch, still wrote now and then, though of course, Jacob didn’t admit that to Lillith, who had, like Kelly, been one of Sophie’s bridesmaids and therefore subscribed to the official position that Tom Beckham was scum. “What about Lillith?”
“She was killed in a car accident. Three days ago.”
Tom hadn’t known Lillith well, but she’d always seemed much more…alive than most people. She was a beauty, a brain and a class clown all in one. What kind of accident had been potent enough to extinguish all that?
“I’m sorry to hear that. How is Jacob?”
“He’s a mess,” Kelly said. “That’s why I’m calling. The funeral is tomorrow and he hopes you can come. He needs a friend…and you seem to be the one he wants.”
It was subtle but he could hear how inexplicable she found that fact to be. “Okay,” he said.
“You’ll come?” She must have been expecting an argument.
“Yes. Tell him I’ll be there. What time is the funeral?”
“One. But Tom, if I tell him you’re coming, and then you…”
“Kelly, I’m telling you I will be there. Have I ever lied to you?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Not to me.”
Happily Never After
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
Sometimes, true love makes an appearance at the worst possible moment. When you’re too young, when you’re living on another continent, when you’re on opposite sides of a stormy issue. Or when you’re about to marry her best friend.
For Tom Beckham, the hero of Happily Never After, falling in love with Kelly was the dumbest thing he could do. Well, maybe the second-dumbest. The first was getting engaged to beautiful but troubled heiress Sophie Mellon.
The three glamorous Mellon siblings have always been clouded in a miasma of rumors. Their neighbors hear things they can’t quite understand—and don’t dare to repeat. But Tom, a young, ambitious lawyer, didn’t care. Sophie’s good looks and impressive mansion could help his career, and that was all that mattered.
Until he fell in love with her bridesmaid. Until ugly rumors became hideous truth. Until he left Sophie at the church, dressed in antique lace, her beautiful face streaming with tears.
He spent ten years trying to forget Kelly—and the terrible truth about the woman he almost married. But now members of the wedding party are starting to die. He’ll have to face all his old demons—including his love for Kelly—if he’s going to survive.
I have a special fondness for the “reunion” romance. I adore the thought that, like water seeking an outlet, true love can trickle through the years, overcoming the most daunting barriers, navigating the most amazing bends and turns. And then, somehow, find its way safely home. I hope you enjoy watching Tom and Kelly earn their second chance.
My next Harlequin Signature Select book, Quiet as the Grave, will also feature a couple who must endure years of separation. Thanks to my Firefly Glen readers who wrote asking for Mike and Suzie’s story, these two fascinating characters will finally find out whether puppy love has the strength to survive in the real—and very dangerous—adult world.
I love to hear from readers! Please visit my Web site at www.KathleenOBrien.net, or write me at P.O. Box 947633, Maitland, FL 32794.
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bonus Features
CHAPTER ONE
THE BEST VIEW of the tortured and beautiful Mellon house was from the top of the East River Bridge. In winter, when the elm trees had shivered themselves to skeletons, you could see everything, right down to the statue that had toppled over in the fern garden twenty years ago and had never been set right.
Mrs. Mellon must hate to see the sheltering leaves fall, Kelly Ralston thought as she turned right on Market and headed toward the bridge. The proud old woman would hate feeling so exposed. Coeur Volé had been built a hundred years ago, but even then it had been designed for privacy. And that was long before Sebastian’s accident, Mr. Mellon’s death or Sophie’s…
Long before tragedy knocked on the door of Coeur Volé and apparently moved in to stay.
Even so, Kelly—and probably half the population of Cathedral Cove—never crossed the bridge without slowing down to stare. She did it now, though it was a foggy autumn midnight, not winter, and she couldn’t realistically expect to see anything but shadows.
Lillith Griggs, whose restored Jaguar was right in front of Kelly’s, wasn’t slowing down, though. Lightning Lillith, as her husband teasingly called her, was infamous for collecting the most speeding tickets in Cathedral Cove. Of course, she was a lawyer, so she wiggled her way out of a lot of them.
Suddenly the cell phone tucked into Kelly’s cup holder vibrated noisily.
“Hey, I meant to ask you,” Lillith said without preamble. “Did you hear that Sophie’s checked herself out again?”
“No. Really? Is she back at home?” Kelly maneuvered onto the bridge, keeping close to her friend’s car. In an un-characteristic display of caution, Lillith had asked Kelly to follow her home from the bar where they’d had a late dinner. Lillith was ordinarily the most self-confident person Kelly had ever met. But she’d been getting weird phone calls, she said. And for the past few days, she’d had the feeling someone was following her.
Kelly had a horrible thought. “God, Lily. Are you saying you think Sophie’s been following you?”
“Well, no, probably not. Actually, I’m sorry I even mentioned that. I’m probably imagining it all.” Lillith laughed, and for the first time tonight she sounded like herself. “It’s probably just this spooky feeling of having another person living in my own body. Pregnancy is weird, if you really think about it.”
Kelly laughed, but kept both hands on the wheel. The East River Bridge was steep, and they were reaching the peak. “No, it’s not. It’s perfectly normal and wonderful. I can’t wait to hear what Jacob says when you tell him. Promise you’ll call me immediately.”
“I won’t have to. You’ll hear him all the way out to your studio, beating his breast and whooping like the darling dumb jock he is. He’ll be insufferable. He’ll act like his sperm has made a field goal from the fifty-yard line.”
“In a way, it has.” Kelly didn’t pay much attention to Lillith’s acerbic tone. The Griggses had been married six years, and they were silly in love. Kelly had always struggled with a little jealousy, not being very good at the marriage thing herself. And now that there was a Griggs baby on the way…
But just then Kelly caught her first glimpse of the strange, needlelike tower of Coeur Volé piercing the low-lying fog, and she remembered that she had a lot to be grateful for, after all. She might not be as happy as Lily Griggs, but at least she wasn’t cursed.
Her car crested the top of the bridge, just feet behind Lillith’s. Over the phone line she heard Lillith’s sudden intake of breath. “What the hell?”
“What?” Kelly asked, but then she saw it. The stained glass in the highest tower window was glowing. “It’s probably Sophie. She’s always had trouble sleeping, even as a teenager. And now that she spends so much time in institutions—”
She heard a low curse from Lillith’s end, and an ominous, repetitive thumping sound. “Damn it,” Lillith said harshly. “What’s wrong with this damn thing?”
“What?” But suddenly Kelly realized that Lillith’s gasp hadn’t been a reaction to the tower light. She probably hadn’t even seen it.
Something was wrong with Lillith’s car. She was taking the down slope of the bridge much too fast, even for Lightning Lillith. Fog shot from beneath her tires like jet contrails. Her taillights were pulling away, stretching the distance between their two cars.
At the foot of the bridge, hidden at the moment in a blanket of damp silver fog, the road made a sharp right-hand curve to avoid the first of the riverfront mansions. If Lillith didn’t slow down…
“Lily!” Kelly realized she was shouting into the cell phone. But Lillith’s car was still gathering speed, sucked down by gravity, going twice as fast now as Kelly’s. Kelly had to fight the instinct to hit the accelerator, to try to catch her. That would be madness. And yet, it was impossible to accept that there was nothing she could do.
“Lily, for God’s sake, slow down!”
“Damn it.” Lillith’s voice was tight and husky, as if her throat were raw. The thumping sound continued. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What’s happening?”
“The brakes.” And then Lillith’s voice seemed to come from a distance, and Kelly knew she’d dropped the cell phone. “Damn it, damn it. Catch, damn it. Why won’t—”
“Lily! The hand brake! Pull the hand brake!”
Was that the right advice? Kelly’s mind wasn’t working, didn’t have time to work. Maybe Lillith should turn the car in a circle, or try to use the median to interrupt the momentum—
The red sports car changed lanes, deliberately, Kelly thought. Then it clipped the guardrail of the bridge. Yellow and white sparks flew as the two metals kissed. It helped a little, but they were running out of time, running out of bridge. Kelly began to pray.
At the last minute, Lillith swerved, but it was too late. The car was still going much too fast. Though Kelly was now a hundred yards behind, she felt the shudder as Lillith’s car lifted off the asphalt, bumped over the curb, shot across the smooth green grass of an elegant lawn, and finally rammed headfirst into the scarred trunk of an ancient, unyielding oak.
The car seemed for a horrible instant to be trying to climb the tree, but of course it couldn’t be. The nose of the car collapsed like an accordion, and the air exploded with lightning bolts of broken glass.
And then everything was still.
Kelly slammed on her brakes and tumbled out of her car without even stopping to turn off the engine. She was trying to punch in 911 on her cell phone, but her fingers were like rubber, and she misdialed twice before she got through. She ran, but her legs were shaking so hard she twisted her ankle and had to hobble the last few yards.
“We need an ambulance. There’s been a terrible accident.”
“Where are you?”
She looked around. For a moment she couldn’t think where they were. It was so dark. Everything was foggy and silent, except for the hiss of something coming out of Lillith’s car.
“The bridge,” she managed to say. She stumbled over the curb and dropped the telephone. Somehow she found it again, just in time to hear the voice on the other end asking her which bridge.
Which bridge? This bridge. This cruel, dangerous, deadly bridge. But what was it called? She needed to be more coherent. She had always hoped she was the kind of person who would be good in a crisis. But she felt as if her heart and mind had collapsed, just like the hood of Lillith’s car.
“The foot of the East River Bridge,” she said. “The south side, the Destiny Drive side. She hit a tree. Please. Send someone right away.”
Her toe jammed a boulder half-hidden by the fog. Pain streaked up her shin, and once again she dropped the telephone. This time it clattered against other rocks and disappeared into the fog. Kelly felt the ground for it briefly, but then she heard a sound coming from the Jaguar. A low, moaning sound.
“I’m here,” she called out. She scrambled over wet grass until she finally reached the car.
It was the saddest sight she’d ever seen.
Everything gaped unnaturally, pitifully exposed. The right front headlight had been knocked free and was dangling by wires. Both doors had been ripped open, and the trunk was open, too. Even the glove box had been knocked loose.
Lillith’s personal things were scattered all over the ground—her purse, a pair of running shoes tied together by the laces, an old McDonald’s cup with the straw still in it, her billfold with a picture of Jacob smiling, and a Boudoir Boutique sack full of smashed bath beads that filled the air with the scents of sandalwood and vanilla.
It was so wrong. Lillith was always so elegant and organized. Though Kelly knew it didn’t really matter right now, she had to fight the urge to gather up the things, to protect the privacy that had been so heartlessly violated.
“I’m here,” she said again, though she hadn’t heard any more sounds. She rushed to the driver’s side. Lillith was still sitting upright, the lap belt still connected. This old classic sports car didn’t have an air bag, though Jacob was always bugging Lillith to install one.
Under the distorted hood, the hoses were steaming and hissing, as if they were mad with fury. The front tires no longer touched the ground, and when Kelly reached out to touch Lillith, the car wobbled.
“Lily,” she said. “Lily, are you all right?”
Lillith turned her head slowly and tried to speak. Kelly felt the air draining out of her lungs, the strength out of her muscles, but somehow she found the courage to keep from fainting.
It wasn’t even Lillith anymore. Blood coated everything, but under the blood Lillith’s face was crushed. One cheekbone had disappeared entirely, and her eye seemed to melt into the hollow below. Her nose was flat, and something white poked through the bloody mess of skin. And her mouth…
Everything was swollen, and broken and rearranged. Kelly saw a tooth lying in a gleaming pool of blood on Lillith’s chin, and her stomach spasmed, sending a gag of half-digested spaghetti erupting toward her throat.
She fought it back.
“Hold on, Lily,” she said, and suddenly her voice was strong again. “The ambulance is coming.”
Lillith seemed to be trying to shake her head. She closed her eyes—though the one over the sunken cheek wouldn’t shut properly.
“I’ve already called 911,” Kelly said. Miraculously, one of Lillith’s hands seemed untouched. Kelly took it into her own. It was cold. “They’ll be here soon. They’ll know what to do.”
Lillith moved her lips again. Kelly tried to hear—she made out an e, but the consonants were all a bubbling mush of blood.
Maybe it was Kelly.
Or maybe baby.
Or perhaps it was simply Help me.
“Lily,” she said again. In the movies, people always begged dying friends to keep talking. Was there some magic in that? But how could she ask those mangled lips to try to form words?
God, she was useless. The truth was, she had no idea what to do.
“Lily, I love you,” Kelly said, because there was nothing else to say, and because it seemed important. She was aware that tears were flooding down her face.
Lillith nodded a fraction of an inch. Or maybe Kelly just wanted to believe she did. And then Lillith seemed to try to speak again. Kelly leaned forward.
It was as wet and half-formed as before.
But this time it sounded like Sophie.
It was the last word Lillith Griggs ever spoke. She was dead before the ambulance arrived.
CHAPTER TWO
TOM BECKHAM HAD A SIXTH SENSE about parties. He could predict to within about ten minutes when they were going to go bad or get ugly.
As a rule, that instinct was quite useful. He always slipped out the door just before the champagne or the conversation fell flat. He said his goodbyes five minutes before the fight broke out on the patio or the junior partner puked in the pool.
But fat lot of good that sixth sense could do him today, at this party, which was being held on a boat, about three hundred yards off the Georgia coast. Though his instincts were definitely telling him to get the hell out of here, he couldn’t really do anything about it.
He glanced over the side of the seventy-five-foot yacht, where the Atlantic was sparkling under the cold September sun like a million sequin-tipped knifepoints. Swimming was out of the question, he supposed.
But if things kept deteriorating—and the ratio of guests to alcohol indicated it would—he just might consider it.
“Tom!” A hand grabbed Tom’s forearm so hard he spilled his drink, which, now that the ice had melted, was filled to overflowing. Watered-down scotch mapped cool trails down his hand. “You’re not thinking of jumping overboard, are you? The Smythe case couldn’t have bothered you that much. Everybody loses now and then.”
Shaking scotch from his hand, Tom turned with a smile. Bailey Ormonde, senior partner and head estate-planning attorney in Tom’s law firm, always talked too loudly and shook hands too firmly as a way of compensating for being about five-three. But he wasn’t at heart a bad guy.
“If I jump, it won’t be because of Smythe,” Tom said. “I didn’t lose that case—justice won. The guy had a second set of financial records hidden in his underwear drawer, for God’s sake. It took them about five minutes to find it.”
“What a moron.” Bailey snorted. “Still, this is the second time you’ve mentioned Justice, capital J, in the past week. Not a good thing in our favorite civil litigator. I’m starting to worry about you, pal. What’s the matter?”
Trust Bailey to home in on the real issue. Lawyers in the elite firm of Ormonde, White and Murray weren’t supposed to value Justice over Victory. Justice was a malleable concept. It was whatever you wanted it to be. Victory, on the other hand, was absolute. In the lofty heavens of their penthouse world, the Client was God, and the Blind Lady was either supposed to join the choir or get out of the way.
Tom had understood that when he’d joined the firm ten years ago. He understood it still. So what was the matter with him? Midlife crisis? A little early for that, at only thirty-five. Professional burnout? Ditto on that.
Too soon to grow a conscience, as well—his portfolio wasn’t anywhere nearly big enough yet.
Nope, too early for any of that. So why, in some deep, unspoken place, did he sometimes have the feeling it might be a great deal too late?
But this wasn’t the time for soul-searching, and Bailey was no Freud anyhow. So instead of answering, Tom sipped at his drink and squinted at the cluster of guests near the starboard railing. Such beautiful people, bronzed by expensive machines, and then gilded by the sunlight until they looked like golden statues from the lobby of some fin de siècle opera house.
Bailey was too smart to push it. He knew that, in his way, he’d put Tom on notice, and he trusted Tom to read between the lines.
“So where is your gorgeous lady friend?” Bailey raised one eyebrow. “I hope you haven’t let Coach O’Toole get his hands on her.”
Tom scanned the crowd. Darlene was undoubtedly in there somewhere, though she had arrived on her own, as she’d been running late this morning.
Yep, there she was. Bailey wasn’t exaggerating. She was gorgeous. She stood in a nimbus of sunlight, one hand at her breast and the other lightly curved just at the apex of her thighs, looking for all the world like a Botticelli Venus—not a coincidence, Tom felt sure. Her dress was virginal white, but so filmy and formfitting she looked as if she’d been dipped in milk and set out to be licked clean.
Tom waited for the appreciative twitch to register in his groin, but it didn’t come. Poor Darlene. Not even a twitch, where once there had been earthquakes.
She had no idea, but their clock had just struck midnight. Her magic had run out.
Frankly, he hadn’t even wanted her to come today. She’d begun vigorously working the crowd at these events, smiling her heart out while she talked him up. It annoyed him. It looked like an audition for the role of trophy wife.
“You’re a lucky devil, Beckham,” Bailey said, shaking his head and making a noise that, if he hadn’t been the senior partner, would have been smacking his lips. “When does her lease expire? You always trade ’em in after a year, right? Any chance she thinks short guys are hot?”
Tom wondered if his thoughts about Darlene had registered on his face. He rearranged his features. “Women don’t care if you’re small as long as you’ve got a great big—” he grinned “—credit limit. In that department, you’ve got everyone on this boat whipped. Even Coach O’Toole, in spite of that ridiculous bonus the alums have just added to his paycheck.”
Bailey eyed Mick O’Toole, the head coach for the Midwest Georgia University football team, who stood talking to his host, the most arrogant MGU alum of them all, Trent Saroyan. Saroyan owned the boat, and it might be successfully argued that he owned O’Toole, too.
He’d thrown the party today to celebrate a strong 2–0 start for O’Toole’s second season as MGU head coach. The Spitfires had had a 15–2 season last year, almost making it to the National Championship game. The party, the yacht and the bonus were just the alum’s polite way of saying that this year it had better be the gold ring.
“You think he knows he’s going to get shitcanned if he loses even one game this season?” Bailey’s shrewd eyes held a hint of pity. But just a hint. Their firm represented Trent Saroyan, the yachtsman and check-writer, not the coach.
“Nope,” Tom said. “Look at him. He’s still naive enough to think he can get loud with the boosters.”
Oh, hell. That must be what had activated his sixth sense. Mick O’Toole and Trent Saroyan were standing too close together, and their voices were rising, developing sharp edges. They were arguing about O’Toole’s choice of starting quarterback.
“Crap,” Bailey said. “I’d better try to do something about that.” He dropped his cocktail glass on the mahogany bar and departed.
Not a moment too soon, either. Saroyan held a shot glass in his right hand, but his index finger was extended, and he’d begun to jab it toward O’Toole’s left shoulder, which was a very bad sign.
And here came another one. Apparently noticing that Tom was alone, Darlene began murmuring and air-kissing her way out of her crowd and gliding back over toward him. Her smile didn’t look right. Shit. What had he done now? Had he violated the twenty-minute rule? That was about how long she could take being ignored without getting snitty.
Tom glanced at the water again and wondered how many degrees it was. If only he weren’t wearing his most comfortable old cords, he might actually do it. Between Darlene and O’Toole, this party was going down.
“Hey,” Darlene said, making the word two warm syllables with honey on top. Darlene’s body might be Botticelli, but her voice was pure Gone with the Wind. Still, her smile didn’t look right.
“Hey, there,” he responded carefully. He wondered if it was possible she’d heard Bailey’s comment about her lease expiring. Like all good old boys, Bailey did tend to boom a bit.
But would that be so terrible? Tom was going to have to end it soon anyhow. He didn’t want a trophy wife. He didn’t want a wife period.
Ten years ago, after the…fiasco…he’d decided his life needed some strict ground rules. He had no intentions of living as a monk, all hair shirts and no sex, but he did try to keep all his relationships clean and sweet and mutually satisfying. He’d been pretty successful, so far. That sixth sense about parties applied to love affairs, too, ordinarily.
“I stopped by the apartment on my way over here,” she said.
He tried not to react to her word choice. The apartment, she said these days. Not your apartment. It was just one step short of our apartment, and it was a big mistake, though she obviously didn’t know it.
“I got Otis to let me in,” she added casually.
He wasn’t sure why that shocked him so much. Otis was the seventy-year-old doorman, and he was drooling in love with Darlene. Otis would probably agree to let her into any apartment in the building, even if she were carrying a metal detector and a large black sack.
Tom supposed he was shocked that Darlene would take advantage of the nice old guy like that. Whatever the reason, his smile felt tight.
“And why did you do that?”
“I’d left my driver’s license next to the sofa,” she said, and he had to admit she told the lie beautifully. “Anyhow, I also picked up the mail for you. I knew you’d been waiting for that transcript.”
“Really. Was it there?”
“No.” She lifted her gold clutch and opened it deftly. “But this was.”
She held out a small pink envelope. Immediately he caught the cloying scent of gardenias.
Damn it to hell. He had hoped he’d never see another one of these. But even if he had to, he wasn’t supposed to get it yet. Not for another week.
Could it possibly be a coincidence?
But he knew it wasn’t.
He knew it was Sophie.
As always, he felt his lungs tightening, as if they wanted to reject the sickeningly sweet smell. Or was he just trying to reject the idea that Sophie had sent him another “anniversary” card? Every year he told himself that surely this would be the last. She’d forget, she’d lose interest, her therapists would finally convince her that it did no good, especially since he never responded.
It had been ten years now. Ten years since he’d walked out of a church filled with these poisonously sweet white flowers. Ten years since he’d walked out on Sophie.
But she’d never forgotten. And she clearly intended to make sure that he didn’t, either. Which was fairly ironic, actually.
Darlene pushed the card forward a fraction of an inch, and he realized he needed to do something. He held out his hand calmly and took it. He flipped it over, glanced at the return address just to be sure the gardenia smell hadn’t tricked him, then flipped it back to see whether Sophie had addressed his name the usual way, with a small heart where the O in Tom should be.
She had.
No wonder Darlene’s smile looked so tight and thin.
“Well?” She snapped her little gold clutch shut sharply.
“Well, what?” He slipped the envelope into his wind-breaker pocket, patted it to be sure it was secure, then zipped up his jacket against the fresh, high wind that hinted at a squall before sunset.
Darlene paused, her mouth half-open. She obviously knew the next few moments were dangerous and was looking for the right words.
“It’s really too cold for a boat party, don’t you think?” He hunched his shoulders. “But I guess Saroyan couldn’t wait till spring to show off his new baby.”
In his head Tom begged Darlene to be very careful, to take the conversational fire exit he was offering. He didn’t like being cornered, and she’d gone too far when she’d pawed through his mail. And he damn sure didn’t want to talk to her about Sophie.
If she forced him to do this now, he might say things he’d regret.
She wasn’t great at reading his thoughts, though, and he knew his face revealed only a tilted smile and a slightly sarcastic arch to one brow. It was an expression he’d perfected over the last decade.
The arched brow probably tipped her over the edge. Darlene had odd moments of self-respect, and though she might let a man cheat on her, she wouldn’t stand for being mocked.
“Who exactly,” she demanded, “is this Sophie Mellon?”
What a stupid question. What did it matter? When a love affair was over, did it make any difference exactly what, or who, had killed it?
When he didn’t answer, Darlene’s jaw tightened. “So far I know this much. She writes your name like a lovesick adolescent, and she soaks her cards in cheap perfume. Things haven’t been right between us lately, Tom. Is this why? Is she someone I should worry about? Or is she just a—”
A what? Darlene seemed to understand she’d gone too far, but the echo of the unspoken thought seemed to hang in the air between them. What word had she been going to say?
And what was the right word, anyhow? What was Sophie? Slut? Stalker? Psycho? Maybe all those labels applied. And many more, as well.
Maybe the best word was cursed. Poor beautiful, tormented Sophie was cursed, and still she signed his name with a heart.
Suddenly Tom realized he was furious. If Darlene insisted on doing this right here, right now, he was ready. He felt his smile tilt another inch. It probably looked like a smirk by now. He didn’t give a damn about that, either.
“Sophie Mellon is the woman I almost married.”
“What?” Darlene’s eyebrows knitted hard. “Married? When?”
“Ten years ago.”
She shook her head, looking confused and slightly annoyed. She looked, he thought, like an infant rejecting an unappetizing spoonful of strained peas. “But surely…” She took a breath. “If that’s true, why—why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t important.”
Her chin went up. “Wasn’t important?”
He shrugged. “Not to you.”
That was rough. Two circles of hot pink broke out on her skin. But her chin didn’t waver. She was a strong woman, and a distant part of Tom admired her. Maybe she was strong enough that, someday soon, she’d thank him for setting her free.
“When you say you almost married her… What does almost mean? How close did you come?”
“Close enough to hear the wedding bells at my back as I drove out of town.”
“My God. You mean you left her waiting at the altar?”
“No,” he said, still smiling. “Technically, that’s what jilted grooms do. I believe the bride waits in an anteroom off to the side until her husband-to-be shows up and takes his place.”
She hesitated. “But you didn’t. Show up, I mean.”
“No.”
The pink cheeks had faded, leaving behind an ivory pall of shock. It was finally sinking in. Her gaze scoured his face, as if she wondered where her charming Tom had gone.
He wouldn’t be receiving cards from this one for the next decade, that was sure. Good. One tearstained ghost, annually rattling the rusty chains of his ruined conscience, was enough for any man.
She swallowed. “But why? Why didn’t you go through with it?”
For the first time, he hesitated, too.
“Let’s just say…I decided I’d make a rotten husband.”
Amazingly, she balked at that. She wasn’t ready to let go of all her illusions—or her plans.
“Oh, Tom,” she said, reaching out with gentling fingers. “Honey. Don’t say—”
He backed up a quarter of an inch and restored his tilted, insulting smile. “Why not? It’s true—I’m not good husband material. I think I knew that the night I almost screwed her bridesmaid.”
A gasp. And then, as if by instinct, she reared back and slapped him.
It would have caused quite a stir, except that, at the exact same moment, Trent Saroyan shoved Coach O’Toole over the yacht’s elegant teak railing and into the Atlantic Ocean and, as Tom had predicted, all hell broke loose at the party.
THOUGH IT WAS ONLY about eleven-thirty, the darkness out here in the rural Georgia woods was cool, deep and damp, the kind of night that predicted pea-soup fog in the morning.
Kelly stood at her worktable, so absorbed in cutting a very expensive sheet of purple drapery glass that she listened to the muffled twig-cracking sound several seconds before she realized it was the wrong sound at the wrong time. Most of the little animals that shared these woods with her went to bed early—and few of them were capable of producing such big noises anyhow.
Carefully she put down the glass cutter and listened. The sounds continued, quite close now.
It was probably nothing. Maybe something bigger than usual, like a deer, had wandered into her yard.
Still, a shiver of fear shimmied through her.
She stared at the studio window. She couldn’t see anything, of course. Nothing but her own reflection. The old, warped glass distorted a lot, but she still saw a skinny, scruffy redhead with a sad, wide-eyed face.
A sudden heavy, muffled thud came from just beyond the back door.
What was wrong with her? She couldn’t just stand here, frozen. When she’d bought this old place for her stained-glass studio three months ago, her ex-husband Brian had warned that she’d be a nervous wreck way out here with no neighbors. She hadn’t been, though. She’d done fine until two nights ago, when Lily had…
When Lily had died.
In the long, painful forty-eight hours since then, Kelly had been reduced to a mass of singing nerves and emotional confusion. Tears were never more than one thought away. And fear, too. Not active terror, but a shadowy sense that the world was not benign, or even neutral, but was instead somehow malignant, just waiting for you to make a mistake it could exploit.
Like Lily, who’d rushed through life and had never wanted to stop for boring maintenance chores, like putting brake fluid in an aging car.
Or like Kelly, working alone late at night in a falling-down studio with no locks on the doors.
The doctor who’d seen Kelly that night had assured her this reaction would be quite normal. He had prescribed sleeping pills, which she didn’t take, because they seemed to open the floodgate to dreams. She turned to her work instead. She had several commissions to complete in the next weeks, and besides, the precision and focus required calmed her. The careful piecing together of small, seemingly random shapes, which came together to create a coherent whole, comforted her. Stained glass, she realized, was a pretty good analogy for life.
It had only been two days, she reminded herself. The funeral wasn’t even scheduled until the day after tomorrow. Eventually, she’d find her equilibrium again. For now, she just had to force herself to pretend a courage she didn’t really possess.
Though she’d been cutting without her work gloves on—one of her habitual sins—she quietly reached over, opened her drawer and slid her right hand into the soft, protective leather.
Then she picked up the freshly bisected sheet of glass, which came to a lethal point at the tip, and walked to the back of the studio.
She adjusted her grip on the glass. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel her pulse in her fingertips. Slowly, she opened the door….
And found herself looking into the shining black-marble eyes of a raccoon, who had somehow managed to climb to the very top of her three-tiered plant stand and was trying to reach the bird feeder that hung from the soffit.
The poor thing looked mortified, just as frozen into his awkward position as she had been moments earlier. He was huge, with a fat, sprawling belly that suggested this wasn’t his first late-night raid. The long gray streamer of moss that dangled from his ear proved he had tried other approaches first.
One of the branches of the nearest oak came within six feet of the bird feeder. That must have been the thud she’d heard. The little scavenger had jumped and missed.
His stricken gaze seemed to be asking her to pretend she didn’t see him. Smiling a little, she turned her head away. She wasn’t even sure raccoons ate seeds, but if he wanted them that badly, he could have them. She could refill the feeder for the birds in the morning.
It was time to go to bed. She put her hand on the doorknob.
Someone touched her shoulder.
Electric currents of panic shot, primal and unwilled, through every vein. Her right arm came up.
“Kelly?”
“Jacob?” The sudden withdrawal of adrenaline left her limbs weak. With a loud exhale, she slumped against the door, just under the bare bulb that served as an entry light.
“God, Jacob,” she breathed.
Thankfully she’d recognized the voice before she’d had time to slash out with the glass. As it was, she had already raised it to breast level.
Jacob Griggs, Lillith’s husband, looked down at her makeshift weapon, but it didn’t seem to frighten him. He seemed beyond caring that he’d come within six inches of being impaled on a dagger of cut glass.
“I scared you,” he said heavily. He looked up at her. “I’m sorry.”
He looked horrible. His face was gray, but his eyes were small and red-rimmed inside puffy circles of grief. His hair, normally so thick and shiny Lillith had rarely been able to keep her fingers out of it, seemed to have dulled and thinned almost overnight.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said. She took his arm, and realized it was shaking. Two days ago, Jacob had been a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who jogged and played racquetball and danced and gave great parties, and generally made every woman in Cathedral Cove jealous of Lillith. In forty-eight hours, he had turned into an old man.
But what was he doing here at nearly midnight? She looked into those eyes again and wondered if he even knew where he was.
“Jacob, do you want to come in?”
He just stared at her.
She squeezed his hand. “Did you need to talk?”
To her horror, he began to cry. His face twisted with the agony of trying to hold it back. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She put her arm around his waist, though he was a full five inches taller. She wasn’t sure he wouldn’t collapse.
He was still repeating the same broken words. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he moaned.
“What is it? What don’t you know, Jacob?”
He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. His lips were dripping with tears. Finally he groaned and bent over double, his hands on his knees, like a runner pushed beyond endurance. “I don’t know how to live without her.”
CHAPTER THREE
IMOGENE MELLON HAD LONG AGO stopped believing in justice.
Maybe, she thought as she slowly descended Coeur Volé’s wide, twining staircase in the predawn hours, that had happened on her wedding night. The longest night of her life.
The night she’d discovered her handsome, socially prominent husband wasn’t normal.
Well, maybe she should choose another phrase. In Imogene’s youth “not normal” had been a euphemism for homosexual, and lots of young women had no doubt found themselves married to men who were merely looking for camouflage. Imogene believed she could have lived with that. At least then, maybe she and Adler might have learned to be friends.
Instead she had discovered that Adler liked women just fine. He specifically liked to hurt them. Nothing too dramatic. Nothing that left marks or required care. He’d called it “spicing things up.” He’d implied that if you peeked into any bedroom in town you’d find a few of these “toys.”
It made him extremely potent. By the end of her first week of marriage, Imogene was pregnant with Sebastian. A year later, Sophie was conceived. After that, Imogene took birth-control pills secretly for several years. When Adler found out, he broke her wrist, and two months later she was pregnant again, with Samantha.
Her beautiful babies, almost all of them conceived in undignified tableaux of sadism and pain. Still, the children should have been her consolation, her reward for enduring without complaint. And they were, for a while. Then, gradually, she’d begun to understand that they weren’t normal, either.
So much for justice.
She reached the wide staircase landing now, and, as she did almost every morning, she paused to appreciate the way the rising sun lit the huge stained-glass window. She liked to watch the figures come to life. It made her feel less alone in this haunted mansion.
Jean Laurent, the French artist Adler had hired, had done a magnificent job. The twenty-by-twelve window of St. George slaying the dragon had bold colors and great drama.
The dying dragon dominated the bottom third of the window, his sinuous body curled around the feet of the knight, his scales shining like peacock feathers. Up from the dragon, St. George rose like a human tower, tall and triumphant. He lifted his sword into the air, and on the tip of the sword he had impaled the dragon’s glowing red heart.
It was not any failing of Jean Laurent’s talent that caused Imogene to identify more with the dragon than with the resplendent knight. After all, from ground level, the dragon was mostly what one saw. And, naturally, Imogene couldn’t help comparing the handsome St. George to the handsome Adler Mellon. St. George seemed to be enjoying his kill a little too much.
Imogene sometimes wondered whether Jean Laurent might have liked the dragon best, as well. The artist had spent so much time and empathetic energy on the dragon’s face. Its eyes were almost human—green, gray, silver and blue pools of inarticulate misery.
It took about twenty minutes for the sun to climb high enough to illuminate the entire window, but Imogene always waited patiently for the transformation to complete itself. The heart, naturally, was the last to burst into brilliance. The red, jewel-like heart, so real it seemed to be still throbbing.
Imogene had asked Jean Laurent if the window had a name, like any other work of art. He had smiled and turned to Adler with a bow. Coeur Volé, Jean had said. Of course.
Another reason to think perhaps Jean had sympathized with the dragon.
Coeur Volé was French for Stolen Heart.
“Mom?” Samantha was standing about ten steps above her. She still wore her nightgown. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Imogene said. What a ridiculous question. Of course she wasn’t all right. She was dying. They had told her she had maybe a month or two, no longer. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Do you want some breakfast?”
“No.”
Still Samantha hesitated, her hand on the banister. “Do you want anything?”
I want to live.
And I want justice. For my own tormented body, and for the poisoned lives of my children.
She let her gaze leave the agonized eyes of the doomed dragon. She let it slide up the shining armor, through the muscular thighs and powerful shoulders, and into the lusty, inflamed eyes of St. George.
Yes, she thought, feeling something stir in her own loins, finally. This, here at the very end, was what she wanted.
I want, for once in my life, to be the one holding the sword.
TOM HAD A BAD TASTE in his mouth, and it wasn’t from the salmon salad, which he ordered every time he came to this restaurant and which had been as delicious as ever.
The taste came instead from the conversation, especially his part of it. His words had a sticky, artificial after-taste. The hard-to-digest flavor of manipulative half-truths and sugarcoated threats.
From the minute Coach Mick O’Toole had been fished out of the ocean, red-faced and spluttering and flailing his arms wildly, splashing everyone on the boat with salt water, Bailey Ormonde had made it clear that it would be Tom’s job to make sure the man didn’t sue.
Thus, this hastily arranged lunch with O’Toole, who hadn’t even had the sense to bring his own lawyer.
Tom knew the drill. There wasn’t much O’Toole could really do to hurt Saroyan, even if he did decide to sue. People like Saroyan paid big bucks to Ormonde, White and Murray to do what they euphemistically called “asset-protection planning.” That was Murray’s specialty, and he was good at it. Saroyan could pretty much get drunk and run down a convent full of nuns with his SUV, and, though he might do time in the slammer, he’d emerge as rich as ever.
One soggy football coach claiming whiplash didn’t have a chance. But he could annoy and embarrass Saroyan, who had a very thin skin. Saroyan didn’t want a nuisance lawsuit that would keep this unfortunate anecdote alive at every party for the next year. As he’d said during their meeting yesterday, “Goddamn it, boy, just make it go away.”
Considering that Saroyan was only about ten years older than Tom, and had earned every penny of his fortune buying up slums in Atlanta and then painting over the rotten buildings and raising the rents, that “boy” comment had annoyed the hell out of Tom.
Still…this was his job. Bailey always said lawyers were actually diplomats. More like gymnasts, was how Tom saw it. He’d just spent the past hour kissing O’Toole’s dumb ass while twisting his arms back and tying his hands.
He ordered coffee to help with the foul taste in his mouth.
“You know, I’m used to tempers,” O’Toole was saying. He adjusted his neck brace, which did look damn uncomfortable. “Try coaching a bunch of college kids, and you’ll learn about tempers, that’s for sure. The real problem with Saroyan is that he doesn’t understand football. And if he thinks he’s going to call the plays on the field, he’s got another think coming.”
Tom considered giving O’Toole a little friendly advice, but then he looked at that thick neck and those beady eyes, and he decided to have another sip of coffee instead.
“Saroyan didn’t even play football when he was at MGU. He was a math major.” O’Toole said math as if it were something ridiculous, like majoring in tiddlywinks. He didn’t seem to see the connection between Saroyan’s studies and his ability to buy and sell O’Toole ten times a day.
Tom drained his coffee and tilted his watch under the table. Fifteen more minutes of this, at least, before he could check his watch openly, gasp and imply that he’d been enjoying himself so much he’d lost track of the time.
Diplomat? Gymnast? Babysitter might be more accurate. Ego babysitter. He tried to tune out the little voice that said this was nothing a grown man should be doing for a living.
Suddenly, his cell phone began to vibrate. Apparently there was a God.
Giving O’Toole a “gosh, isn’t this annoying, just when we were having such a good time?” smile, Tom unclipped his phone and answered without even bothering to look at the caller ID. Ordinarily he screened, having just enough old girlfriends to be cautious, but right now he’d welcome a call from any one of them.
“This is Tom Beckham,” he said formally, already folding his napkin and crooking a finger to let the waiter know it was time for the check. Whoever really was on the other end of this telephone, as far as O’Toole was concerned, it was urgent firm business.
At first there was just silence. And then he heard a soft female voice.
“Tom?”
For about six tenths of a second he honestly didn’t recognize the voice. And then it hit him. Hit him hard.
It was Kelly.
An image rushed toward him, leapfrogging the years. An image of the two of them in a dark corner, laughing at first, and then touching, and then she was crying, and he was up against her, and she was kissing him and whispering his name, but crying, crying the whole time.
Her red-gold hair falling loose against the green satin of her dress, the fresh-apple smell of her, the salt of her tears on his lips, the insanity inside him.
“Tom? Are you there? It’s Kelly. Kelly Ralston…I mean Kelly Carpenter.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. What’s wrong?”
Now that his mind was working again, he understood that something must have happened. Something bad. She hadn’t called him in ten years, though at first he had deluded himself that she might. No one from the wedding party had ever called him, except Mr. Mellon, who had actually come out to Atlanta ready to beat Tom, he’d said, until he no longer knew his own name and had to be fed with a straw.
“I—I don’t know if you heard,” she said, her voice still somber and husky. He wondered if she’d been crying again. Who made her cry these days?
“Heard what?”
“About Lillith. Lillith Griggs. I mean, she became Lillith Griggs, you knew she and Jacob got married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that.” He and Jacob had been good friends back in law school. Jacob still kept in touch, still wrote now and then, though of course he didn’t admit that to Lillith, who had, like Kelly, been one of Sophie’s bridesmaids and therefore subscribed to the official position that Tom Beckham was scum. “What about Lillith?”
“She was in a car accident. Three days ago.”
“Is she all right?”
“No.” A wretched pause. “She was killed.”
The waiter came over then and held a check for Tom to sign. He scrawled something, almost glad of the distraction. He needed time to absorb the news.
He hadn’t known Lillith well, but she’d always seemed much more…alive than most people. She was always the one laughing, playing practical jokes like wearing stiletto heels to the rehearsal so that the lineup by height suddenly seemed all wrong. She was a beauty and a brain and a class clown all in one. What kind of automobile accident had been savage enough to extinguish all that?
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said carefully, glancing over at O’Toole, who was tonguing around in his empty drink, trying to hook a piece of ice and suck any lingering vodka from its surface. O’Toole met Tom’s gaze over the glass and frowned, pointing at the telephone.
Tom covered the mouthpiece with his palm.
“We’re done here, O’Toole,” he said, though he knew that those four words might well undo all the goodwill he’d spent the past hour building.
O’Toole put his glass down slowly, giving Tom an incredulous look. “Damn right we are,” he said. He tossed his napkin on the table, scraped his chair back loudly and walked away.
“Tom, are you still there?”
Tom took his hand off the telephone. “Yes. Sorry. How is Jacob?”
“He’s a mess,” Kelly said. “That’s why I’m calling. The funeral is tomorrow, and he asked me to let you know. He hopes you can come. I do, too. He needs a friend…and you seem to be the one he wants.”
It was subtle, but he could hear how inexplicable she found that fact to be.
“Okay,” he said.
There was another pause. “You’ll come?” She must have been expecting an argument.
“Yes,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be there. What time is the funeral?”
“One. We’re all meeting at the house and riding together. His house.” She took an audible breath. “But Tom…if I tell him you’re coming, if I get his hopes up, and then you—”
“I’ll be there.” He heard the doubt quivering in her silence. He couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t know that, since he’d left Cathedral Cove, he had never made a promise he didn’t keep. Of course, he made damn few promises.
“Kelly, I’m telling you I will be there. Have I ever lied to you?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Not to me.”
“Then trust me,” he said, and in spite of himself a wry note crept in. He could feel his tilted smile nudging at his lips. But come on. Had anyone on this earth ever spoken a more ironic sentence? “I’ll be there.”
KELLY KNEW BETTER than to trust Tom Beckham, so she couldn’t understand why she was so upset when he didn’t show up at the funeral home, or at the graveside service.
She was just mad at herself, that was all. She should never have told Jacob that Tom was coming. He had kept glancing over his shoulder at the service, and now that they were back at home, every time the door opened he looked up expectantly.
She stood in the kitchen, carefully pulling the plastic wrap off plates of deviled eggs and pans of meat loaf, and trying not to feel a little angry with Jacob, too.
But darn it. He had friends, lots of them. People who really cared about him, people who filled his house and his refrigerator, people who called and stopped by, who prayed at his side and cried at his side and loved Lily almost as much as he did.
Why weren’t they enough? Why did he need Tom Beckham, too?
Why did anyone need Tom Beckham?
The door opened, and to Kelly’s surprise a lovely blonde walked in, dressed in the most elegant little black funeral dress she’d ever seen. It was Samantha Mellon, Sophie’s little sister.
“Hi, Kelly,” Samantha said softly, brushing her long, silky hair back behind her shoulder and smiling. “They told me you were in here. I thought maybe I could help?”
Kelly stuffed the plastic into the trash can, wiped her hands on a towel, and reached out to give Samantha a hello hug. It was very sweet of her to come—and probably somewhat risky. Over the years, her mother and brother had developed an intractably hostile attitude toward every one of the young men and women who had been in Sophie’s wedding party.
As best Kelly could understand, Mrs. Mellon and Sebastian felt that the bridesmaids and groomsmen had all abandoned Sophie after she’d been jilted. True friends would have stuck by her, defended her. If they had, Sophie might never have ended up in an institution.
Was that true? Kelly’s memory of that time was clouded with misery and guilt. It was true that the friendships had ended when the wedding fell apart, but whose choice had that been? Had Sophie avoided them because they reminded her of a day so horrible she couldn’t bear to relive it? Or had they avoided her, the way you might instinctively avoid someone whose luck seemed to have turned spectacularly bad?
Some of them had tried to make contact in the weeks after Tom disappeared, Kelly was sure of that. But Sophie hadn’t been willing. Or maybe she just hadn’t been ready.
Maybe they should have tried harder.
Kelly hadn’t been able to try at all. A huge wall stood between them. She always wondered if Sophie knew about the night that Kelly and Tom had…
Just as she’d always wondered whether that night had played a part in the tragedy that came next.
But there was no one to ask. Tom was gone, and, soon after, Sophie was lost to them, too.
Kelly and Samantha hadn’t seen much of each other through the years—things would always be too awkward for that. But Kelly was still fond of her.
Suddenly she remembered what Lillith had been saying right before the accident. That Sophie had been let out again.
“Sam, Sophie didn’t come with you, did she?”
Samantha’s gray-blue eyes widened. “Of course not. Sophie is—” She hesitated. “She’s still in North Carolina.”
In North Carolina. Is that where the newest mental-health facility was? Over the past decade, if the grapevine could be trusted, Sophie had been in and out of five or six different resident institutions.
So did that mean Lillith had been wrong? Did that mean the light in the tower window hadn’t been Sophie after all?
“She hasn’t come home? I heard that she had.”
“No, she’s not up to being on her own right now. The doctor said, with the anniversary coming up so soon…” Samantha looked perplexed. “Who told you she was?”
“I think Lillith had heard it somewhere.”
Samantha shook her head sadly. “The gossips must be at it again. I think the anniversary always stirs things up, don’t you? But frankly, this terrible accident would be so hard for her. Just this once, I’m glad she’s not here.”
Kelly reached out and touched Samantha’s hand. Poor Sam. Now that Sebastian had married and moved to Raleigh, Sam was living alone at Coeur Volé with their mother, who had never been a picnic but who had become even more eccentric through the years.
Sam looked amazingly like Sophie these days. All the Mellon siblings looked similar—the lush blond hair, the deep-set eyes, the sex appeal and the elegance. Sebastian and Sophie had often been mistaken for twins. They were only a year apart and they had an intimacy that seemed almost preternatural, the kind you sometimes do see in twins.
Samantha was five years younger, and it wasn’t until she grew up that the striking Mellon looks displayed themselves. Now the only real difference was in the eyes. Sophie’s and Sebastian’s were a dramatic peacock blue, and they sparkled with an essence of danger, a flash of the untamable. Sam’s eyes were light, and her gaze was gentle, almost humble.
It made Kelly’s heart ache to look at her. This was what Sophie should have been.
“Well, anyway, I’d love some help,” Kelly said. “So many people have brought food. He’ll never eat it all, so we might as well use it up today.”
Samantha nodded and began efficiently stacking small sandwiches on a large silver plate. “He seems very weak,” she said. “It’s so terrible. It’s obviously broken his heart.”
“Yes.” Kelly blinked back moisture. This wasn’t her tragedy. This wasn’t her day to cry. But it was hard. A week ago she’d been in this kitchen drinking coffee with Lily from these same cups. “I suppose time will help. It’s still so new.”
“When I talked to him just now, he told me he was waiting for Tom Beckham.” Sam looked over at Kelly somberly. “Is that true, or is it just wishful thinking? I didn’t think we’d ever see Tom in Cathedral Cove again.”
Kelly sighed and slid the rest of the potato salad into the refrigerator. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He asked me to call Tom, and I did. Tom promised he’d be here, but—”
Samantha smiled ruefully. “But historically Tom’s promises haven’t really been worth much.”
“Right. You wouldn’t believe how distant he sounded on the phone when I told him about Lillith.”
She didn’t mention that it had taken her two hours to get up the nerve to dial the number, and when he’d answered she’d found that she needed to sit down, because her legs wouldn’t hold her.
“Ten years,” she said. “We hadn’t exchanged a single word in ten years. And yet, throughout the call his voice was completely bland and impersonal. He might as well have been talking to his secretary.”
Samantha lifted one graceful shoulder philosophically, as if to say what did you expect?
Good question. It made Kelly feel ridiculous to admit that she had expected more. In the private photo album of her heart, Tom Beckham had been the most-often-relived memory, in spite of the ache it always brought. She had about a dozen pictures that never seemed to fade: Tom in the gardens of Coeur Volé, with roses behind him and the river at his feet; Tom dancing with Sophie, tall and handsome in his tuxedo, with Sophie’s silver dress flashing rainbows as she twirled under the chandelier; Tom turning to Kelly in the darkness, fierce and full of hunger…
She was a fool. While she’d been wistfully fingering those images, she’d assumed that he, too, took them out now and then and remembered. But apparently he’d long since thrown them away. As she should have.
“I heard that you were behind her when it happened,” Samantha said suddenly. “I heard you were with her when she died.”
Kelly looked up. “Yes.”
“That must have been awful. I’m so sorry. But at least—at least she wasn’t alone at the end.”
“Yes.” Kelly had thought of that, but she wondered how much comfort she had really been. Lillith had seemed dazed, already moving away from the blood and the fog and the hissing car. Her cold hand had not responded to Kelly’s touch. Kelly had been just inches away, but in every way that mattered, Lillith had died alone anyhow. Perhaps everyone did.
“Was she still conscious? Did she say anything?”
Kelly closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Sam, but if I keep talking about this, I’m going to fall apart, and Jacob doesn’t need that today.” She picked up the plate of deviled eggs and handed it to the other woman. “Let’s get the food out there, okay?”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Samantha was embarrassed, her fair skin tinged with pink.
Kelly remembered how easy it used to be for Sophie to hurt Sam’s feelings. “Scram, brat,” Sophie would say, and Sam’s blue eyes would fill with tears. She had idolized her older siblings, and Sophie and Bastian had exploited that shamelessly.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said, giving Sam a warm smile. “Do you think you can grab that plate, too? Jacob doesn’t like meat loaf, so if it doesn’t get eaten today it’ll go to waste.”
“No problem.” Sam balanced both trays like a waitress, and Kelly took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door. She looked around, trying to locate Jacob in the crowd, which had swelled considerably while she was in the kitchen.
And then she saw him. He was at the door, shaking hands with a tall, dark, handsome stranger who wasn’t a stranger at all.
It was Tom Beckham.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LIVING ROOM of the Griggs’ house was huge and airy, the perfect room for two energetic lawyers with a healthy combined income and a zest for entertaining.
One whole wall was ceiling-to-floor windows that overlooked a sunny bricked garden, and the ceiling was at least thirteen feet high.
Upstairs, there were three bedrooms, three luxurious bathrooms and a billiard room—which would soon have become a nursery. And of course the kitchen was terrific, but most of the square footage of the house was found in this one gracious room.
At the moment, though, it didn’t seem big enough. The minute Kelly recognized Tom at the door, she felt short of breath, as if the room didn’t hold enough air for the both of them.
Samantha seemed a little taken aback, too. She paused just in front of Kelly. “He did come,” she breathed. “I can’t believe it.”
But then something strange happened.
Nothing happened.
No one gasped, no one froze with shock, no one jumped from his seat and pointed at Tom, screaming, “There he is! He’s the one!”
A couple of women glanced over toward the door—and then surreptitiously ran hands over their hair or adjusted their skirts more flatteringly around their knees. But, for the most part, Tom Beckham’s return to Cathedral Cove was a nonevent.
Though Sophie Mellon’s jilting and the emotional breakdown that followed were legendary in the Cove, Kelly realized that very few people in the room had ever met Tom Beckham or knew what he looked like. In their minds, he probably looked like a movie pirate, or a highwayman—someone bigger than life and as cold as the last stroke of midnight.
The kind of mythical man who could destroy a woman simply by not wanting her.
Looking at him now, Kelly realized that, in her mind, too, the same thing had happened. Tom Beckham had become an idea, not a human being.
She had forgotten real-life details, the little things that made him Tom, and not just the infamous runaway groom. Things like how long-waisted he was, which always made it look as if he were wearing his slacks low on his narrow hips. Like how the right side of his smile lifted slightly higher than the left. Or how he tried to keep his dark brown hair off his broad forehead, but never quite could.
“Kelly,” Samantha said quietly. “I think I’m just going to slip out the back, if you don’t mind. It’s awkward. I mean, I didn’t think he—”
“I understand,” Kelly said. Of course Samantha wasn’t eager to come face-to-face with Tom Beckham again. “I’ll tell Jacob goodbye for you.”
“Thanks,” Samantha said. “I’ll—I’ll talk to you soon.”
They both knew it wasn’t true. They had seen each other maybe half a dozen times in the past ten years. But it eased the moment, and Kelly appreciated it. She nodded, and watched as Sam set her plates down on a table, then retreated to the kitchen and, from there, presumably out the back door.
Kelly began to circulate with her platter of deviled eggs. Watching Jacob and Tom from the corner of her eye, she tried to subtly wind her way over toward the piano, the spot farthest from the front door.
But she wasn’t much of a strategist. When the room was this crowded, the large grand piano and the semicircular mauve silk sofa created a beautifully decorated dead end. She turned around and found herself staring at Tom, with no escape route in sight.
Damn him for being even more attractive than ever.
“Hi, Kelly.” His smile wasn’t big enough to be inappropriate at a funeral, but it still had that lopsided effect that always made him seem to be secretly laughing at everyone. “It’s been a long time. You look great.”
Like hell she did. She had been crying for four days, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, in case she started crying again. Besides, she was thirty-two now, not twenty-two, and women didn’t just keep on getting better the way men did.
She was glad the half-empty deviled egg platter kept her from having to decide whether to shake his hand.
“Hello, Tom,” she said. “I’m glad you could finally make it.”
He obviously heard the implied criticism. He dropped the smile. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here for the funeral. I did try. But I was at the mercy of a very inconsiderate jury.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said briskly. “I’m sure Jacob understands.”
Tom glanced back toward the center of the room, where Jacob was sitting on the edge of an armchair, talking to Lillith’s parents. Lillith’s mother had her purse in one hand and a mangled tissue in the other. They had to fly back to Ohio, and they must be saying goodbye to Jacob. All three of them looked exhausted.
“He’s much worse than I expected,” Tom said. “I thought— He was always so tough.”
Kelly gave Tom a look. Hadn’t he learned anything in the past ten years? Hadn’t he found anyone he could truly care about?
“He’s still tough,” she said flatly. “But he loved Lillith. A lot. They had one of the happiest marriages I’ve ever seen.”
Tom’s smile returned, just for a flash. “Ahh,” he said. “But is that really saying very much?”
She chose not to respond to that. She wasn’t really shocked—he’d always had a cynical side. And life had a tendency to deepen cynicism, not eliminate it, especially when you weren’t even trying to fight back.
No, she wasn’t shocked, but she was sorry. She didn’t remember many of the things they’d said to each other back then—most of it had been silly and inconsequential, all the deeper meanings and growing awareness lurking between the lines. On their last night, though, he’d spoken one line she would never forget.
When he had finally accepted that they could never be lovers, not even once, he had looked at her with the bleakest face she’d ever seen, and he’d said, “I would have liked to know how it felt to make love to you—I might have built a soul out of a memory like that.”
Through the years, she had sometimes felt generous enough to hope that some other woman would bring him a memory like that. One untainted with the guilt and shame theirs would have carried.
“Have I offended you, belittling wedded bliss?” He arched an eyebrow. “Are you still such an idealist, Kelly? I heard you tried marriage out for a little while yourself. Was it all silver bells and scented bowers?”
“No,” she said. “I’m sure you know that Brian and I divorced two years ago.”
“Yes. Jacob mentioned it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was amicable. Brian and I are still friends.”
“Good for you,” he said. “Very civilized.”
She didn’t answer that, either. She couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her, or if that slightly snide tone was natural to him now. But there really wasn’t anything to say about getting into or out of a marriage that didn’t take them down a dangerous conversational road.
She shifted the platter, which was starting to feel heavy. “I guess I’d better offer these around,” she said. “But it’s good to see you. I’m glad you could make it. I know Jacob would have been disappointed if you—”
The murmur of subdued voices that had been softly pulsing through the room was broken suddenly by the jarring sound of musical notes. Four of them, played on the piano.
Kelly and Tom both looked quickly. Jacob sat on the piano bench, his head lowered onto his arm, which was draped across the edge. With one finger, he stabbed at the piano keys. Four notes. Over and over.
Kelly knew that tune. It was the refrain of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Lillith had loved its jazzy, upbeat charm. Kelly could almost see her now, dancing out of the kitchen with a platter of perfectly roasted Cornish hen, which she’d just whipped up for the dinner party, singing, “Come on and hear, Come on and hear…”
Jacob kept playing. Everyone in the room was watching.
Kelly dropped the deviled-egg plate onto the coffee table and hurried over to Jacob. She knelt beside the piano. Though she couldn’t see his face, she could tell by the movement of his shoulders that he was crying. The four notes grew louder, more strident.
“Jacob.” She put her hand on his arm, which was as hard as rock. “Jacob, don’t.”
His fingers paused, and as the seconds ticked away she felt the tension drain from his muscles. He lifted his head, and his face was running with tears.
“I haven’t slept, Kelly,” he said, as if they were alone in the room. “I can’t. I wake up, and she’s not there.”
“I know,” she said. Had he really not slept in four days? No wonder he couldn’t cope. “You miss her. But you need to sleep, Jacob. She wouldn’t want you to make yourself sick.”
“I don’t care what she wants,” he said, his voice harsh, though new tears kept coursing down his flooded cheeks. “She left me. She didn’t care what I needed.”
“Oh, Jacob. You know that’s not true.”
He buried his face in his arm again, unwilling to listen. Kelly scanned the room, checking all the shocked and pitying faces. Was Jacob’s doctor here? His minister? This was grief more profound, more complex, than she had any idea how to handle.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up.
Tom was standing behind her. He tilted his head slightly, asking her to move away and let him in. Reluctantly, she did so. At the very least, it would free her to call the doctor.
“Jacob, listen to me,” Tom said with a voice that was amazingly gentle. “Let’s go upstairs. You’re falling apart, pal. You’ve got to get some sleep.”
Jacob frowned, but to Kelly’s surprise he seemed to be listening. “How?” he asked, sounding like a child who would like to obey but doesn’t understand what’s required. “How?”
“Simple.” Tom held out his hand. Dangling from two fingers was a big gold-labeled bottle of scotch. He must have grabbed it from the liquor cabinet beside the sofa. “We’ll get wasted. We’ll drink till we drop, just like the old days.”
Jacob blinked. Tom reached out, hooked one hand under his friend’s elbow and urged him to his feet. Jacob nodded wearily. He rubbed his hand over his face, wiping away the tears just as if he had a handkerchief, though his palm was bare.
He put his other hand on Tom’s shoulder. He already looked a little drunk, though Kelly knew it was simple exhaustion.
“Did I tell you?” Jacob frowned hard, staring with glazed eyes at Tom. “Did I tell you Lily was going to have a baby?”
In the back of the room someone sobbed softly.
“No,” Tom said, never relinquishing eye contact with Jacob. “You didn’t tell me. Come on upstairs, and let’s talk about it.”
When they were gone, and the voices in the room began to murmur again, Kelly turned and shoved through the swinging door into the kitchen. She put the heels of her hands on the blue granite counter and tried to take deep breaths. Help him, Lily, she prayed silently. Help him to go to sleep.
“You should stay away from that one.”
Kelly’s head jerked up. She had come stumbling in here, half-blinded by emotion. She hadn’t considered the possibility that the kitchen was already occupied.
What awful luck. It was Trig Boccardi, who lived next door to the Mellons. He had gone to high school with Sophie and Kelly, where he’d been the wrestling team’s star. His friends called him Trig, short for Trigonometry, the same way they might call a fat boy “Slim.”
He’d always been slow, but Kelly always wondered if he might have found himself in one headlock too many, because by the time he had gotten out of high school he was downright weird.
And he’d carried a torch for Sophie for about fifteen years now, although she’d never given him a single ounce of encouragement. The day Sophie’s wedding fell through, Trig had been so angry with Tom that they’d had to call a doctor to sedate him.
She’d never been comfortable around him, but she tried to compose her features. “What do you mean, Trig? Stay away from what one?”
“It’s not safe to be with any of them now,” he said, and the flat warning in his voice made her skin crawl. He frequently didn’t quite make sense. Was this just another of those times?
He still wore his sandy-brown hair in the buzz cut the wrestling coach had required and his muscles were still cut sharp and powerful, as if he thought he might be called on to throw down a few opponents on the mat at any moment.
“People have to pay for their sins,” he said. “And you’d better stay away from him. He’s dangerous when he’s angry. He’ll make you pay.”
Usually she tried to be pleasant to Trig when she encountered him, but today she’d had enough. Today she had nothing left.
“Who?” Her voice was sharp. “Who is dangerous? Who will make me pay?”
Trig rolled his eyes upward.
“Someone upstairs? Who? Do you mean Jacob? Do you mean Tom?”
Trig shook his head slowly. “I mean God.”
WHEN JACOB WAS SUFFICIENTLY talked out and liquored up, which took about three hours, he collapsed into a deep, noisy sleep. And then, wishing he could do the same, Tom went back downstairs.
Everyone was long gone, the house straightened up to perfection. All that remained was a refrigerator full of plastic-covered food and a note from Kelly that read simply “Jacob’s friend Joe will be coming over at nine. I’d appreciate it if you can stay till then. If you can’t, please call me.” And then her telephone number.
It was eight o’clock already. And he didn’t have anywhere to go—just an empty hotel room that he hadn’t even checked into yet. So why not stay?
He started to throw away the note, but he changed his mind and pocketed it instead. He didn’t delude himself. He liked knowing he had her number, even though he’d be a damn fool if he ever called it.
Fresh air. That’s what he needed. Jacob’s pain had filled that bedroom like a poisonous gas, and Tom had been breathing it for hours now. He didn’t know how Jacob had survived the past four days, with nothing but agony for air.
Just one more reason never to get married. Tom had been keeping a list for a decade—and he was up in the hundreds now.
The backyard garden of the Griggs’ house was beautiful, but right now Tom needed open spaces with no walls. He made himself a cup of coffee and went out front to drink it.
He plopped down on the stoop, undoubtedly verboten in a swank neighborhood like this, but so what? He put the coffee on the step below him, between his feet, and stared out into the cool, clear evening.
He liked autumn in Georgia. He liked the crisp little silver stars, swimming in the black sky like minnows. He liked the breeze in the Chinese elm, which hadn’t lost its leaves yet. He liked the smell of wood fires burning in nearby houses.
He shut his eyes. Several streets over, someone’s dog was barking. The sound echoed on the sides of hills three miles away, and the dog must have enjoyed that, because he kept barking. Maybe he imagined he was a wolf.
After ten minutes or so, when the coffee was drained, Tom felt better. His head had cleared enough that he could think.
And the first thing he thought of was Kelly.
On the surface, she hadn’t changed much at all. Still skinny and unaffected, still not quite sure how to control her long, curly hair. Still an honest look in those wide blue eyes, and a vulnerable bow at the top of those full, pink lips. Still about ten times sexier than she had any idea she was.
But on the inside, things had definitely changed.
For one thing, she didn’t love him anymore.
He heard footsteps coming down the sidewalk, not uncommon at eight-thirty in a safe, comfortable neighborhood. He wondered if Kelly was coming back to check on him, to see if he’d stayed as she’d asked.
But it was Samantha Mellon, Sophie’s little sister. He felt his muscles brace. He’d seen Sam scurrying out of Jacob’s house today the minute she’d laid eyes on Tom. He assumed that meant she didn’t trust herself to be polite.
So if she was coming back now, it must mean she’d decided it was time for a little therapeutic rudeness. He climbed down the stairs, down the front walk, hoping he could meet her on the sidewalk. She might get noisy—she had every right to. The important thing was not to wake Jacob.
To his surprise, when she saw him her steps quickened. She reached him with hands outstretched. “Tom!”
He allowed her to take his hands into hers. This wasn’t what he’d expected, but he certainly wasn’t going to complain if she’d decided not to claw his eyes out.
“Hey, Sam,” he said, smiling. “I hardly recognized you, kiddo. You’ve really grown up.”
Her pretty smile faded. “Yes. I look like Sophie now. Everyone tells me so. Does it—does it make you uncomfortable?”
He laughed. This was really strange. But kind of refreshing. Was it possible she was willing to discuss Sophie openly? He wouldn’t do it, of course, but it was a novel feeling to think he could.
“Of course not,” he said. “Sophie was beautiful. And so are you.”
“Thank you.” She squeezed his hands. “I’m so sorry, Tom. I shouldn’t have avoided you earlier. It’s been so long, and I wanted so much to talk to you. I just didn’t know how to begin.”
“Well, you’re off to a good start. What did you want to talk about?”
She didn’t answer right away. In the moonlight it was difficult to tell, but he thought maybe she was flushing.
“I—I think I just wanted you to know that, in spite of what Mother and Sebastian may have said, not everyone in our family hates you.”
He smiled. “I think that just leaves you, doesn’t it? But I appreciate it, Sam. It’s generous of you.”
She shook her head. “It’s not. It’s merely the truth. I don’t know why you didn’t marry Sophie, but I do know that we’re—” She bit her lower lip, as if she couldn’t think of the perfect word. “Mellons aren’t easy people. And look at Sophie—she can’t even live on her own. She’s not stable, and she never was, not really. So how could you have brought yourself to marry her? I wanted you to know I don’t blame you.”
Now he was the one who didn’t know what to say. He felt as if he’d just received a papal blessing—a blessing he hadn’t asked for and didn’t deserve. “Sam, I’m sorry. I appreciate what you’re saying, but this really isn’t something I’m comfortable talking about.”
She tilted her head to get a better look at him. “Not even to me?”
“Not even to you.”
“I see.” She dropped his hands slowly. “Of course, I understand. I probably shouldn’t have come all the way out here, bothering you when obviously you’re tired.”
“It’s all right, Sam. I’m glad you came. It was good to see you again.”
She still looked slightly crestfallen. He wondered what kind of reception she’d been expecting. Had she thought he would go down on his knees and thank her for the absolution? She must know that the only one who had the right to “forgive” him was Sophie herself. And that wasn’t likely to happen.
She must also know that, in the past ten years, he’d found a way to stop tormenting himself about all of this. He was quite contented now to carry on unforgiven.
But instead she seemed to feel oddly rejected.
“Well, I should go home, anyway,” she said. “Mother will be wondering where I am. I’m the only one she has left now, you know. She gets possessive. It’s…it’s pretty hard.”
“Sam—”
She laughed, a little too loudly. He instinctively glanced toward Jacob’s window, hoping he wouldn’t hear.
“I didn’t mean to whine,” Samantha said. “It’s not that bad, and I remember how you hate melodrama. Sophie told me about that—she said she would have to learn to control herself because emotion irritated you.”
Had he said that? Probably he had. Sophie’s broad, unpredictable and, to his view, overindulged emotions had annoyed the hell out of him. She’d cried for hours, and he hadn’t felt a thing. But perversely, when Kelly had wept in his arms, every tear had been a little drop of fire.
What a bastard he’d been.
Correction. What a bastard he still was.
Just ask Darlene, who had been crying on the telephone this morning. Knowing she could go on for hours, he’d set the phone on the bed and continued packing. When he came back, she’d been gone.
“Sam, look—”
“No, it’s all right, really. I still don’t blame you.” She seemed to be trying to find some middle ground between the eager welcome she’d started with and the uptight formality she’d briefly switched to. It obviously wasn’t easy for her to find the right note. In the end, they didn’t actually know each other very well, in spite of the fact that they’d come within twelve hours of being in-laws.
“I just want to ask you one thing, Tom, and then I’ll go. It’s important. Have you seen Sophie lately? Do you know where she is?”
“Where she is?” Tom frowned. “I thought she was either…in residence somewhere, or at home. Isn’t that the case?”
“Usually. But—” She ran her fingers through her hair. “We don’t know where she is right now. Mother called the clinic in Raleigh, but Sophie is just a voluntary patient, and apparently she checked herself out. She said she was coming home.”
“But she didn’t?”
“No. At least—”
A leaf skittered past. Samantha glanced behind her, as if she expected to see Sophie walking toward them. For some strange reason, the gesture made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“No, she didn’t come home. We’re not making this public, but Mother and I haven’t heard from her in weeks. And we need to find her. Mother is… She’s…” She reached up and began playing nervously with the buttons on her shirt. “Oh, you don’t care about all this.”
“Yes, I do. What about your mother?”
She looked at him with huge eyes, her fingers still picking at the top button. “She just found out she’s dying. It’s a brain tumor. Inoperable. Funny, I always thought that word was just too cliché. But it really means something. It means there’s no hope.”
“Oh, my God. Sam, I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t. She was terrible to you. She’s terrible to everyone. I’m the only one left now, though, and so I get it all.”
For a minute he thought Samantha might cry, too. She deserved to cry, with everything she’d been through—and all the heartbreak that undoubtedly lay ahead, as she nursed a dying mother.
But why bring her tears to him? Did she have no friends, no lover, no intimate of any kind? Surely she hadn’t kept her emotions bottled up for ten full years, waiting for him to materialize and listen?
Or maybe she’d done exactly that. God, these irrationally emotional Mellons! He was sorry for her. No wonder she was on such an emotional seesaw. But frankly, he just didn’t know if he could take it right now. Being with Jacob had sapped him of any strength he had possessed when he’d arrived.
“Sam, I’m sorry, but it’s been a long day, and I think I’d better—”
“I know. You’re tired. I shouldn’t have come. But there’s something else I have to tell you. I hope—hope you’re not staying long in Cathedral Cove.”
“Why?”
“That sounded rude, didn’t it? I didn’t mean it to be. It’s just that Mother is— She’s not herself. There’s no telling what she might say if she ran into you. And Sebastian is here, too, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. But so what?”
She tried to smile, but she was opening and shutting that top button repetitively, as if she couldn’t convince herself she had properly fixed it. The overall effect was extremely odd.
“Well,” she said finally, “it’s just that…if you think Mother hates you, you should hear the names Sebastian calls you.”
Tom stifled a yawn. Sebastian Mellon didn’t frighten him in the least. In fact, it might feel wonderful just to take the gloves off and have it out with that effete snob once and for all.
“I’d love to,” he said. “Send him over.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“BRIAN, STOP. I’d like to drive by Jacob’s house one more time, just to be sure he didn’t end up all alone.”
Kelly’s ex-husband, who was giving her a lift home from the dealership, where she’d just deposited her car for service—no one who knew Lillith was likely to postpone routine maintenance anymore—made an annoyed sound.
Even so, he obediently slowed the car and signaled for a right-hand turn.
“What’s the problem?” He glanced over at her. “I thought you said Beckham was keeping an eye on Jacob.”
“I think he is, but I just want to be sure. Tom is—” She was silent a moment, watching the commercial buildings give way to masonry cottages, and then to elegant brick houses with wide, well-manicured lawns. Jacob and Lillith had been able to buy in one of the best Cathedral Cove neighborhoods. Not the truly elite old-money enclave by the river, where the Mellons still reigned, but close enough.
“Tom is what?” Brian sounded grumpy. He had moved to Cathedral Cove and opened up his sporting-goods store only about six years ago, and, like many newcomers, he seemed to think the story of Sophie’s wedding was about seventy-five percent trashy fiction.
And even if it was true, his sympathies naturally lay with Tom Beckham—one, because Tom was just a regular guy, comparatively speaking, and two, because everyone knew those Mellons were a bunch of inbred freaks.
Kelly sighed. “Well, after what he did to Soph—”
“It was ten years ago, for God’s sake,” Brian broke in. “You don’t know what the guy is anymore.”
“Exactly,” she agreed, not in the mood to fight. Besides, Brian’s down-to-earth practicality had always been his most appealing quality. She had felt very comfortable, very safe, in the two years of their marriage. “He’s an unknown quantity. That’s why I want to check.”
“Fine. We’ll check.”
But when they got to Jacob’s street, she could immediately see Tom’s expensive silver sedan in the driveway. She knew it was his because it had been the only car remaining on the street when she had left Jacob’s house after doing the dishes. Also, it had Atlanta license plates, and it just screamed overpaid big-city lawyer.
Tom must have pulled it into the driveway sometime after she’d gone. That had a settled-in feeling, and she relaxed a little. Jacob was probably fine for tonight.
“I guess Tom did stay,” she said softly. “Good for him.”
“Of course he did,” Brian said. “Guys don’t walk out on their buddies.”
She glanced at him with a wry smile. “Just on their women? Well, you should know.”
“That’s right,” he responded archly, and she could see the white of his teeth as he grinned in the darkness. “Especially if their women are cold-hearted bitches.”
She chuckled. This was an old joke with them, as comfortable now as a well-worn sweater. After two years of a pleasant but fire-free marriage, Brian had confessed that he’d fallen in love with Marie Eller, his lovely, loyal accountant. Kelly had been sad but not quite heartbroken. She knew Brian deserved a passion she simply didn’t feel—and apparently Marie could give him that.
What she’d told Tom today was true. She and Brian had divorced without acrimony, and they’d never stopped being friends.
In fact, right now Marie was the one who was giving Brian a hard time. Last month, she had asked him to move out, telling him she needed “space” and time to think. He was pretty upset, but handling it in his usual sensible way, working hard and hoping for the best.
“Okay, boss-lady, now where? Shall we do the official Sophie’s Wedding World Tour? We’ve checked on the runaway groom. Shall we go by the House of Usher and see how the rest of the weirdos are doing?”
Kelly had heard people call Coeur Volé “the House of Usher” before. She supposed it was inevitable. The Mellons were reclusive, the structure was Gothic and Sophie’s story offered such great fodder for the imagination. But it always seemed a bit cruel to her. It made a joke of things that she knew weren’t funny.
But she decided to ignore it. He didn’t mean anything, really. The working class always bashed the snobbish old guard. She’d done it herself, before Sophie had picked her for a friend.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough drama for one day. Did I tell you Samantha came by to see Jacob? She wasn’t at the service, but she stopped in at the house afterward.”
“Yeah? Did she bring her crazy brother?”
Kelly settled onto the truck’s sensible cloth seats and shut her eyes. Brian had owned this pickup ever since she first met him, and the familiar smell and rhythmic rocking were relaxing.
“You mean Sebastian?” She shook her head sleepily. “No, Sebastian lives somewhere in North Carolina. He’s not even in town.”
“Yes, he is.”
She opened her eyes. “What are you talking about? Sebastian is back in Cathedral Cove? How do you know that?”
“I saw him. Today, in the store. I sold him a hunting knife and a pair of sneakers. Too bad he didn’t want to buy a gun. I would have loved to do a background check on that one. I’ll bet we’d find that he’s been in more loony bins than his sister.”
She sat up straight. “Sebastian is back?”
“That’s what I said, like three times now.” He cut a quick glance her way. “What’s wrong with that? He’s weird, but no weirder than the rest of them.”
“But…” She felt a tightness in the pit of her stomach. What a coincidence that Sebastian should come home right now, just when Lillith died, just when Tom showed up for the first time in ten years.
And Lillith had told Kelly that Sophie was back, too. If all of it was true, this would be the first time the whole Mellon family—and Tom Beckham—had been in Cathedral Cove together since the wedding.
She braided her fingers in her lap. It just didn’t feel right. It felt downright unnatural, as disturbing as if she had looked up and seen the stars crawling out of their prescribed places, sliding slowly into some new, mysterious configuration.
Could this be what Trig had meant when he’d said, “He’s dangerous when he’s angry”? Could he have meant Sebastian? Kelly had seen Sebastian angry only a few times during their teenage years, but it had been a sight to remember. Trig, living next door, might have seen even more.
Was it possible that, in his foggy, incoherent way, Trig had been trying to tell her something important?
“Talk to me, Kel. What’s the big deal about Sebastian being home?”
She tried to focus, to articulate her vague anxieties. “It’s just that…if Sebastian’s here, and Tom’s here…” She paused. “I wonder if he knows Tom’s here?”
“So what if he does? You think Sebastian will hunt down Tom Beckham and kick his ass for what he did to sister Sophie ten years ago? Cripes, will you people ever let that damn story go? It’s over, for God’s sake. Get a grip.”
She told herself that Brian probably was right. Even lava-hot emotions could do a lot of cooling down in a decade. At the time of the jilting, Sebastian had been very defensive for Sophie. But though Sebastian and Sophie had been inseparable as young people, they must have grown apart through these past few years.
Sophie had spent so much time in institutions. And Sebastian, Kelly had heard, had married out in Raleigh. He had children and a career, stockbroker or something. Obviously, at least to some degree, he had moved on.
They were nearing the Mellon house now. She could see the tower from here. It was completely dark tonight. But that didn’t mean it was empty, only that the lights were out. She shivered, thinking of someone standing up there, in the shadows, looking down.
How much could you see from there?
Could you see the foot of the East River Bridge?
“Brian,” she said suddenly. “Will you sleep at my place tonight? I’ve put a bed in the guest room, so you wouldn’t have to take the sofa.”
He tilted his head, smiling. “Spooky old dump finally starting to give you the creeps?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s just that—”
She thought of the waiting, silent trees around her studio. She thought of Lillith’s face covered in blood, and Trig standing in Jacob’s kitchen, talking cryptically about God and danger.
To heck with saving face. Tomorrow she’d be strong. Tonight she needed a friend. “Yes.”
Brian drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Well…. Marie won’t like it.”
“Oh.” She tried to control her disappointment. But the idea of being out there alone tonight, with no car… “Never mind, then. I wouldn’t want to cause trouble between you two. If you think you shouldn’t—”
“I never said that. I just said Marie wouldn’t like it. Maybe that’s a good thing.” He waggled his eyebrows. “A little jealousy might be exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“Thanks,” she said, almost ashamed of the relief that coursed through her. She definitely had to get back to being tough tomorrow. “I appreciate it, Brian. I really do.”
She turned her head and stared out the window. They were approaching the spot where Lillith had hit the tree. In a minute they would have to cross the East River Bridge, over to the area unofficially known as the “Left Bank.” Over there, the houses were smaller, funkier, just starting to come back from a long economic down-slide.
Tight zoning was a luxury the Left Bank couldn’t afford. Artsy yuppie condos were haphazardly mixed in with coffee shops, antiques mini-marts and New Age candle boutiques. Beyond the Left Bank lay the rural fringes, where your neighbors were mostly trees, or people who owned guns and horses and dogs named Zeke.
It was out there that Kelly had bought her new place, a surprisingly charming run-down cottage with a detached garage that made the perfect studio. So though she definitely lived, in Cathedral Cove parlance, far, far on “the wrong side of the bridge,” she loved it. Most of the time.
Just not tonight.
“Look,” Brian said. “Someone has already put up a marker for Lillith.”
Kelly saw it at the same time. On the side of the road, just a couple of feet from the tree, a waist-high circular sign stood, announcing to all passersby that tragedy had visited this spot.
Through the years, she’d seen a hundred roadside markers just like this one. But they had always seemed comfortably impersonal, just small, circular plaques that said Drive Carefully, sometimes decorated with crosses, sometimes with flowers, depending on how recent the accident had been. She had always driven by without much more than a generic whisper of sympathy.
But this one was different. She wondered who had put it there. It hadn’t been there this morning.
Jacob hadn’t been in any shape to think of such a gesture. Someone had, though. At least four arrangements of flowers clustered on and around it—and an elaborate floral wreath had been hooked over the top of the sign, like a crown or a halo.
And there was something else. Was it a ribbon? There was very little wind tonight, and yet the thing—was it fabric?—was fluttering oddly, so light it seemed to defy gravity.
She squinted. What was that, draped over the left side of the wreath, undulating, as if it were alive and trying to get her attention?
It looked almost like a streamer of fog, or moss…or…
Something cold gathered around her heart. No, it couldn’t be that.
The breeze was playing with it.
“Brian, stop,” she cried.
He sighed even as he put on the brakes.
“Now what? Come on, Kel, I’m tired. Whatever it is, can’t it wait until—”
But she had already opened the car door and climbed out. She couldn’t hear the end of his sentence.
She walked over to the marker and took the soft, fluttering, weightless scrap into her numb hands. She turned it over. She traced its familiar, exquisite pattern with disbelieving fingers.
It wasn’t fog or moss. It was exactly what she had thought it was.
It was a piece of lace from Sophie Mellon’s wedding dress.
MARY JO’S CAFÉ AND SWEET SHOP was charming from the street side, all hanging baskets of red geraniums, green awnings and shiny black wrought-iron tables and chairs.
But from the alley out back, it looked like any other strip retail business, just a no-frills utility door, an over-filled Dumpster, a teetering stack of wet wooden palettes and an empty plastic bag bumping up against the wall, shoved around by the wind.
Kelly pulled into the dead-end alley, did an automatic three-point turn to leave her minivan facing out and then cut the engine. Here under the trees, it was cool and damp and dirty. The twilight was a mournful blue.
She suddenly wished she’d put this chore first on her list today, not last.
But she had to stop this foolishness. She wasn’t by nature a coward, though she certainly had been acting like one ever since Lillith’s death.
Like last night. Asking Brian to stay had been ridiculous. He had sacked out in the guest room, exhausted from his own long day, the minute they got to Kelly’s place. She’d spent another several hours in the studio, working, essentially alone anyhow.
Still, it had been nice to know another human being was nearby.
He’d taken her to get her van as soon as the dealership had called, and then, as pleasantly as ever, they’d gone their separate ways. They’d both had a million things to do.
Now she was tired. But Kelly had promised Mary Jo she’d return all the café trays they’d used for the funeral food, so, in spite of the eerie blue shadows in the alley, she had to do it.
The café was still open—it would be serving dinner till ten—but most of the other stores on the street were already closed. The only two cars in the alley were Mary Jo’s Honda and Kelly’s minivan, which wasn’t glamorous but was convenient for transporting the big sheets of stained glass she needed for special projects.
Kelly had called ahead, so Mary Jo was waiting for her at the utility door. They unloaded the trays efficiently without much chatter and stacked them in the café’s kitchen.
“Thanks for bringing the stuff back,” Mary Jo said as she walked Kelly to the van. “I can use it tonight. You know what weekends are like.”
Kelly nodded. And they walked the rest of the way in silence. Apparently Mary Jo didn’t feel like making small talk any more than she did.
Maybe Mary Jo realized, just as Kelly had, that handling the funeral food had been the last little chore they’d ever do for Lillith.
After the accident, the first day or two had brought a mercifully numb shock. After that, the details of the funeral had been hectic and distracting.
But now it was over. Life went on. And they had to face that it went on without Lillith.
When they got to the van, Mary Jo hugged her. “Did you get that starter looked at?”
Kelly smiled. “Yeah. Transmission needed work, too. Two thousand dollars altogether. But at least it starts right up.”
“Ouch.” Mary Jo grimaced. “Well. Take care.”
“I will.” Kelly watched as Mary Jo turned and walked slowly back to the store. She didn’t look as if she had enough energy to get to the door, much less shepherd her café through the dinner rush. Tragedy had so many repercussions, big and small.
“Oh—wait—” Kelly said suddenly. “I meant to ask you. Have you heard anything about Sophie being back in town?”
Mary Jo turned. She shook her head. “No. Dale over at the Texaco came in for lunch today, and he said he’d seen Sebastian, which surprised me. It’s been a couple of years since the Mellon heir graced us with his presence, hasn’t it? But Sophie? No. As far as I know she’s still an inpatient.”
Kelly thought about mentioning what Lily had said, but decided against it. And there wasn’t any point asking Mary Jo about the scrap of lace. Mary Jo hadn’t been a member of the wedding party, so she would never have seen Sophie’s dress anyhow.
So Kelly just said goodbye again and watched Mary Jo go back inside. Then she opened the door of her van, eager to get out of this alley now that she was alone. Something was rummaging behind the Dumpster, but Kelly couldn’t see what. The limp blue twilight had lost its struggle with darkness. Only small patches of light lay between long, black stretches of shadow.
Definitely time to go. Besides, if she went straight home now, she could put in a good four hours on the wine-shop project, which was falling seriously behind.
But darn it. Down at the front end of the alley, a large refrigeration truck had pulled in, blocking the exit. Behind her, the alley came to a dead end, so she’d have to wait.
Maybe the driver would make his delivery quickly. In the meantime, she could at least check on the glass in the back. With her keys still in her hand, she circled the van and opened the hatch doors.
She’d had special slots installed in the cargo area so that she could transport sheets of glass safely. Today, all the slots were filled.
The wine-shop project was the most challenging commission she’d ever landed—a tunnellike entryway for the upscale establishment, with lush stained-glass grapevines winding on both sides, and even on the ceiling.
This afternoon she’d picked out half a dozen sheets of the most beautiful green full-antique glass. It had cost a fortune, virtually eliminating any hope that this project would turn a profit. But the glass had such extraordinary linear striations, which would produce grape leaves so textured and real no customer would walk through that entryway without reaching out to touch them.
She hadn’t been able to resist. Anyhow, if this project turned out to look as spectacular as she hoped, it would be worth its weight in permanent advertising.
She adjusted a couple of boxes so that everything was wedged in snugly, and then, hearing an odd noise behind her, she turned.
Trig Boccardi was standing only about four feet behind the truck, a glower on his heavy face, erasing what little good looks he had left from his high-school glory.
Unnerved, Kelly glanced around. Mary Jo’s café was the last store at the dead end. Unless he had climbed over the alley fence, or come out of the café kitchen, he had pretty much materialized out of thin air.
“Hi, Trig,” she said neutrally. She whisked shut the van’s cargo doors. She didn’t like to have those pricy sheets of glass exposed to anyone as unpredictable as Trig. “Where’d you come from? You startled me.”
“You took it.” Trig’s brows hung low over his eyes. “Didn’t you?”
She didn’t like his tone, which was strangely aggressive. And, as usual, he wasn’t making sense. “I don’t know what you mean. Took what?”
“The lace. You took the lace from the wreath. Don’t pretend you didn’t. I saw you do it.”
Kelly’s stomach tightened. He had seen her? He had been watching her? From where? No wonder she’d had such a creepy feeling about spending the night alone.
How often did he do that?
“Yes,” she said. “I took it.”
“You shouldn’t have. It’s not yours.”
She glanced toward the front of the alley. The refrigeration truck was still there. But that wasn’t all bad. It meant that somewhere nearby was a truck driver, too. Just in case.
And Mary Jo was just inside the café. She’d come out if she had any idea something was wrong. Kelly began to move around the van a little, toward the driver’s side. Toward the horn.
“You shouldn’t have taken it,” he repeated. He had followed her all the way around, still staring intently.
“Why not?” She paused by the door, wishing she’d left the window open so she could just reach in and touch the horn. She tried to read his expression, unsure whether he was very sad, or very angry—or maybe even a little frightened himself. “Did you put the lace there, Trig?”
He recoiled. “Of course not. She put it there.”
“She? Who?”
He blinked several times, always a sign that he was agitated. “You know who. It’s hers.” He advanced a step. “She’ll be mad that you took it.”
Behind her back, she began to rearrange her keys in the palm of her hand, so that the metal points stuck out between her fingers. Trig was big and muscular, but his thinking was slow, and she hoped his reflexes were, too.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. I was just surprised when I saw it, and I wasn’t thinking. Maybe I should put it back.”
He thrust out his hand. “I’ll put it back. You shouldn’t have taken it.”
Did he think she carried it with her everywhere she went? “I don’t have it with me,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, Trig. I’ll take care of it later.”
“No,” he said. He took another step, his head ducked low, like an animal who was considering an attack. She’d never appreciated how much like a bull he actually looked, with that bulky body and that triangular head.
The groan and grind of gears just ahead told her the truck was leaving. Taking advantage of the distraction, she pulled open the door and climbed quickly into the driver’s seat. Shutting herself in, she rolled down the window and looked sternly at Trig.
“I want you to go home now, Trig. And I want you to leave me alone.”
He put his hand on the door. “No,” he said harshly.
“Yes,” she said, putting her keys in the ignition and turning over the engine, which, thankfully, started right up. Suddenly the two thousand dollars she’d paid the dealership seemed like a bargain.
“You have to go home now. And listen to me, Trig. I don’t know why you were watching me the other night, but I want you to stop it. You can get in a lot of trouble for things like that.”
He frowned, backing away a couple of inches, as if her stern tone startled him. He shook his head, a jerky and uncoordinated denial.
“I wasn’t watching you,” he said thinly. He blinked several times. “I was watching her.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE NEXT MORNING Kelly sat at her studio’s semicircular work desk, heart-shaped pieces of glimmering green glass littering the countertops. It looked as if, sometime during the night, the ceiling had rained enchanted leaves.
But she wasn’t paying any attention to the freshly cut pieces, which were ready to be burnished with foil. Instead, she was listening to the ringing telephone crooked between her ear and her shoulder, and staring at a photograph she held awkwardly in her newly bandaged fingers.
She hardly noticed the bandages. She always sliced or burned herself while she was cutting and grinding small pieces. If nothing required stitches, she considered it a good day’s work.
Besides, the picture held all her attention. She hadn’t looked at it in years. It had been tucked carefully away in the pages of an old scrapbook. It was a picture of Sophie’s wedding party, taken the night of the rehearsal dinner.
No wonder she’d been reluctant to keep it where she could see it. It was as potent as an uncorked vial of magic smoke. Kelly found that she could remember every moment of that night, as if it had been yesterday.
Such vivid memories… The scratchy seams of her green dress, which had been a little too tight. The way they’d all laughed because the cello player was out of tune. The time Lillith had sprayed champagne through her nose when Kent Snyder told a vulgar joke.
She remembered it all, every emotion, right down to the deep, scraping ache in the hollow of her heart.
While the others had been laughing and drinking and playing silly games, Kelly had been counting the hours until Tom officially belonged to Sophie. Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two…
By the time the wedding party corralled a waiter and asked him to take this picture with Kelly’s disposable camera, it was one in the morning. Only seventeen hours until the wedding.
Looking down at those faces now, with all the bitter knowledge of hindsight, Kelly thought maybe she could detect the turmoil seething under the surface smiles.
Against her ear, the phone was still ringing. She hung up and dialed a second time, in case she’d made a mistake. As it began to ring again, she tilted the picture, to better catch the light.
Nine young people. It should have been ten, but Samantha, the maid of honor, had been only seventeen, too young to drink and dance and giggle the night away with the others. She’d been sent home with her parents hours before the picture was taken.
Which left just nine. Sophie and Tom, the bride and the groom. Sebastian, who was the best man. Three ushers— Kent Snyder, Bill Gaskins and Alex VanCamp. Three bridesmaids—Dolly, whose last name was now Tammaro, Lillith, and Kelly herself.
All young. All smiling. But how many of them, Kelly wondered, had been hiding something that night?
Kelly’s own sick guilt was fairly obvious, she thought. Her eyes looked shadowed, and she had her hands clasped in front of her, white-knuckled, almost as if the camera were a harsh deity from which she begged forgiveness.
Sebastian’s head was turned away from the camera, but his jaw was set at a stiff angle, and his shoulders were oddly braced. It was impossible to tell whether he was staring at Sophie or Tom.
Sophie looked gorgeous, of course, in her ice-blue party dress. But her smile was too bright, too fake, as if she were dramatically intoxicated, though Kelly remembered that Sophie had hardly touched her wine that night.
Dark-haired Lillith was making a kissy face, just as energetic and full of spunk then as she had been until the night she died.
Kelly shut her eyes briefly, unable to look at Lillith very long.
They were standing just as they had planned to stand the next day, lined up by height. Dolly, the shortest of the bridesmaids, was on the very end, holding up her dress, because she’d just caught her hem in her high heel and torn it. She was glaring over at Kent Snyder, who, Kelly remembered, had just made a rude joke about Dolly, the clumsy cow.
Kent had been very drunk. The photographer had caught him sticking his tongue out and holding up two fingers to make devil horns behind Bill Gaskins’s head.
Alex VanCamp looked bored. None of them had known Alex very well. He’d been a special friend of Sebastian’s from college, and he’d seemed as if he could have been interestingly dangerous, if he’d found them worth the trouble of leading astray. Dolly had flirted with him, to no avail.
Kelly remembered thinking how peculiar it was that no one in the wedding party seemed to be connected to Tom, not even his groomsmen. Should that have tipped them off? He had seemed like a stranger at his own wedding.
Which brought her, finally, to Tom’s handsome face.
This was the one face that should tell the whole story, and yet, even now, it didn’t. Gorgeous in his tux, he was smiling that familiar lopsided smile, and one of his eyebrows was arched, as if he found the whole thing entertaining, but unimportant.
He seemed unaware of Kelly, of course, though just thirty minutes before she’d been with him in a corner, crying, touching his face one last time. But then, in a weird way he seemed unaware of all of them, as if he were alone in the picture.
Sophie clung to his arm, her whole body yearning toward him. But his body wasn’t responding. Not a single muscle bent in her direction even a fraction of an inch.
Still, though any stranger could look at this picture and see that the bride was more in love than the groom, Kelly didn’t think anyone would guess that, less than seventeen hours later, the groom would disappear.
“Hello?”
Kelly dropped the photo, shocked to realize that someone had answered the telephone. It was a woman.
“Hi. My name is Kelly Ralston. I’m trying to locate Kent Snyder. Do you know if I have the right number?”
A pause stretched oddly. “Yes,” the woman said finally. “This is the right number.”
Kelly couldn’t believe her luck. She’d been trying all morning to reach any of the other members of the wedding party. She wasn’t sure why—just a vague sense that one of them might know something about the wedding lace she’d found on the roadside marker, whether it really was a match for Sophie’s gown.
But they’d all moved away. Only she and Lily had stayed in touch. Tracking even one of the others down had proved more difficult than Kelly had imagined.
Kelly wouldn’t have chosen to start her inquiries with the hard-drinking, slightly vulgar Kent Snyder. But she’d take what she could get. Though she’d left messages several places, this was her first breakthrough.
“Oh, good. I’m sorry to bother you, but Kent and I—” What could she say? They hadn’t been friends, exactly. She’d spent a lot of time with him for the week of wedding festivities, and then she’d never seen him again.
“Some years ago we were in a wedding together. I needed to get some information, and I thought perhaps he could help me. Is he there?”
“No,” the woman said. “Look, what did you say your name was?”
“Kelly Ralston.” Kelly thought the woman sounded edgy. Darn it. Kelly hoped she hadn’t stumbled into some kind of divorce tangle. “I was Kelly Carpenter at the time. We were both in Sophie Mellon’s wedding, ten years ago, in Cathedral Cove.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Kelly, but Kent is dead.”
Kelly was so surprised she couldn’t speak for a moment. Her glance fell on Kent’s picture. He had been a good-looking young man, in a thick-neck, not-very-bright sort of way. He’d been putting on weight even in his early twenties. His shirt was too tight, the buttons threatening to burst. And his face was already too red, flushed by alcohol.
“Kelly?” The woman on the telephone softened her voice, though she still sounded edgy. “I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock. It was to us, too. It was an accident. Two weeks ago.”
Kelly’s voice felt rusty, as if she’d been mute for hours, not seconds. “He had an accident? A car accident?”
“No, although God knows it’s a miracle he never did, the damn fool.” The woman cleared her throat. “It was a hunting accident. He must have stumbled. His gun went off.”
“I’m so sorry.” Kelly shut her eyes. “But are you sure? I mean, are you sure it was an accident?”
“I guess you didn’t know him all that well. I lived with him for eight years. I knew him inside and out. He was a good man, but he drank too much, no reason to sugarcoat it. He had no business handling a gun, the condition he was in, but there was no stopping him when he had his mind made up.”
Somehow Kelly got through the rest of the call, offering condolences and apologies for calling at such a terrible time. When she put the telephone down, her hands felt cold.
Strangely numb, she picked up one of her rich green-glass leaves and held it to the light. The striations really were lovely. She hoped she’d got all the veins “growing” in the right direction.
She remembered what her first stained-glass teacher had told her, all those years ago in the basement of the Mellon house. A gorgeous young French artist, Jean Laurent, had been hired to create a two-story St. George and the Dragon window to hang at the top of the Coeur Volé staircase.
Kelly and Sophie had both instantly fallen in love. But while Sophie lusted after the Frenchman’s black hair and bulging shoulders, Kelly had fallen in love with the glass. The shining green of the dragon’s scales, and the rich, glowing red of his bleeding heart, the twining vines and billowing clouds behind St. George’s triumphant sword.
Probably Jean had become Sophie’s lover. Kelly remembered odd absences, lingering glances. But he had also recognized Kelly’s passion and he had given her hours of his time.
When you cut your leaves, he showed her, or created your clouds, you couldn’t just pick the prettiest spot on your sheet of glass. You had to pick the one that followed the correct lines and rhythms of life.
Hair curled, leaves grew, shadows fell, and even dragons died, according to natural laws. Violate them in the glass, and the entire piece would always be vaguely unsatisfactory.
She picked up a second leaf, twirling it slowly in her bandaged fingers.
Natural laws.
She picked up the picture in her other hand. Two of those smiling people were dead now. Did that follow the laws of nature? Two of ten was twenty percent. If you took any random group of ten relatively intelligent, well-to-do twenty-somethings… Would twenty percent of them be dead within ten years?
The phone rang again.
She dropped the picture but held on to the two leaves. She clicked the talk button.
“Hello.”
“Is this Kelly Ralston?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Phil Tammaro.”
At first Kelly didn’t recognize the name. Tammaro? Did she know anyone named Tammaro?
“I’m Dolly’s husband.”
Oh, of course. She’d left a message there, after she’d finally tracked Dolly down through three completely different marriages, names and addresses.
“Yes,” she said, eager to make up for not remembering. “Yes, Phil, thank you for calling me back.”
“I just came in. I heard your message. I thought I’d better tell you—”
His voice broke, and at the sound Kelly’s heart stopped.
“—tell you about Dolly. You see, Dolly was in an accident. She—she’s dead.”
TOM HAD BEEN LOOKING for Jacob more than an hour before it occurred to him to check the cemetery.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning, still warm but with a crisp hint of fall. After the funeral, Jacob had asked Tom to stay in Cathedral Cove a few days. Jacob didn’t need to be alone right now, and since Tom wasn’t eager to get back to the whole stupid Coach O’Toole mess—not to mention the phone messages that would be waiting from an injured Darlene—he’d said yes.
He’d let his office know he was taking a week of vacation time, which hadn’t gone down well with Bailey, but so what? Every vacation Tom had taken for the past five years had been a working trip, schmoozing some potential client or attending some business conference. They owed him.
Besides, there wasn’t really any such thing as “getting away” if you had a cell phone and a laptop.
Yesterday, Jacob had slept late, so Tom had spent all morning answering e-mails, issuing instructions to his paralegal and hand-holding a couple of clients who wanted to know why you had to notify everyone on the planet before you set a court date for a hearing.
He assumed today would be the same. This morning, though, by the time he got off the phone, Jacob was gone. And he’d left his cell phone behind, which seemed to hint that he’d like to be alone.
It had been a sticky moment. Tom didn’t want to crowd Jacob, who was free to go wherever he wanted. Tom wasn’t exactly the prison warden. But still…though Jacob seemed to be pulling himself together a little, it had been only a week since his wife had died. He was still fragile enough that Tom would rather keep an eye on him.
Finally, just when Tom was starting to admit he was worried, he spotted Jacob’s car. It was pulled off the road, near the entrance to Edgewater Memorial Gardens.
Great. Just perfect. Tom felt for Jacob, really he did. Losing Lillith had put the man through sheer hell. But to tell the truth, Tom had endured all the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing he could take for a while.
This definitely wasn’t how he handled his own challenges. His personal recipe for emotional recovery was a fourteen-hour workday followed by a run of maybe ten miles, or fifteen, or whatever it took to wear out every muscle and brain cell he had.
Cemeteries were for wallowing, and he didn’t wallow. His own parents, who had died when he was in college, had been cremated and scattered at sea. Clean and sensible. No desolate angels clinging to crosses, no granite effigies, no gut-wrenching epitaphs. No tilted, weed-covered tombstones and withered flowers to remind you that, in the end, even love gets tired of grief and forgets to mourn.
But what could he do? He couldn’t exactly call Jacob’s friend Joe and say, Hey, could you go get him? He’s in the cemetery, and I don’t do cemeteries.
So, indulging himself in one heavy sigh, he parked his car and began walking around, looking for Jacob.
This particular cemetery was a pleasant surprise. It was restrained, with no marble explosions of showy grief. Just neat rows of well-tended headstones, and comfortable benches under apple trees and spreading oaks.
For a cemetery, it seemed strangely full of life. The trees were restless with chattering squirrels and noisy birds, and ahead of him on the path a young couple walked slowly hand in hand, as if this were just another pretty park.
Off to his right, toward the river, a funeral service was in progress. A soft blue tent held a dozen mourners and a priest. The priest smiled at him as he passed. Smiling back seemed strange, so Tom merely nodded and walked on.
To his left, where the cemetery blended comfortably into a neighborhood of old, charming, well-kept houses, Tom saw three little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, playing among the trees. One girl had a sword made of an apple branch, and the other two wore crowns of tinfoil and Shasta daisies.
Jacob sat on a bench very near the children, though he faced the other direction. Tom braced himself, took another deep breath, sat on the bench beside him.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You had me a little worried there.”
Jacob looked over at him. Just as Tom had feared, Jacob had been crying. But for the moment, at least, his red eyes were dry.
“Sorry,” Jacob said. “I just felt like I had to come see her.”
Tom glanced over at the lawn. Though he could tell where the freshly dug grave was, he saw no headstone. Of course not, he thought. It wasn’t ready yet.
“I haven’t even decided what it should say.” Jacob had followed Tom’s glance. “We never talked about it. You don’t think of things like that, not at our age.”
“No,” Tom said. “Of course you don’t.”
“We had wills, of course,” Jacob went on. “We were lawyers. We took care of that. We thought of everything. But we didn’t for a minute think we’d ever need them.”
“No,” Tom said. For an uncomfortable moment, he imagined his own neatly typed will, duly notarized and filed. Everything went to charity. Everything, right down to the pictures on his walls and the ties on his rack. It was the will of a completely unencumbered man.
But here, next to Jacob’s aching grief, in the presence of all these dearly departed, Tom realized how pathetic his will would sound when it was read. Like the antiseptic record of a thoroughly unlived life.
Maybe, he thought impulsively, he’d go back and change it. Maybe he’d leave a few things to Jacob, who was the closest thing to a real friend he’d had since elementary school. Tom also had a painting of a red-haired girl standing on a hillside. It was worth a great deal of money, but he knew he’d bought it only because it reminded him of Kelly. Maybe he’d go back and write in a clause leaving it to her. She’d be pretty shocked, wouldn’t she?
“I wish I had fixed the damn brakes myself,” Jacob said suddenly.
Tom looked over at him. “What?”
“Lillith’s brakes. She needed to have the whole system fixed. Everything was leaking. She had to put brake fluid in every few days. I was always carping at her, telling her to just bite the bullet and get it taken care of.”
“But she didn’t?”
Jacob shook his head. “She hated stuff like that. Boring stuff. I knew she hated it. All that time I spent, bitching about how she was letting it go. Why didn’t I just do it?”
Tom didn’t answer. He knew Jacob didn’t expect him to. There was no answer. Jacob hadn’t fixed Lillith’s brakes, and he was just going to have to live with that.
The fact that Lillith would undoubtedly be happy to forgive him didn’t make much difference. Jacob had to learn to forgive himself. If he could.
Sometimes, Tom knew, you couldn’t. Sometimes life’s lemons just couldn’t be turned into lemonade, no matter how hard you tried to squeeze the facts.
Oh, yeah. Tom knew all about that.
The sound of the girls squealing and laughing was closer now. Apparently they were in the middle of a war, with pinecones for cannonballs. One of them had just ricocheted off the branch above Tom’s head, and suddenly another came sailing over and caught Jacob in the shoulder.
“Oh,” the young, high voices said, still giggling, “oh, shit!”
Two of the children disappeared behind tree trunks, but the girl who had thrown the pinecone came over, dragging her sword behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am Sir Lancelot, and I’m trying to rescue Guinevere. I’m not very accurate.”
Jacob smiled. “That’s okay. You throw good and hard. When you fix your aim, you’ll be lethal.”
She smiled at him, retrieved her pinecone, and ran back down the hill toward her buddies. Their daisy crowns could just be seen peeking around the edges of the massive trees.
Jacob looked at Tom. He almost smiled. Then he looked down at his hands.
“I would have liked to have children,” he said.
“I know.” Tom wondered if he should add the conventional statements, like you would make a terrific father, or you will someday. But all those things sounded hollow. Jacob had lost so much. Tom’s instincts told him not to try to minimize that loss.
“What about you?” Jacob glanced up at Tom briefly, then went back to staring at his hands.
“Me? What about me?”
“Don’t you ever want to get married? Don’t you want to have kids?”
Tom shifted on the bench. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes it seems that ship has sailed, you know? There’s not a lot of time, and I haven’t really met anyone I—”
“Is it because of Sophie?”
Tom gave Jacob a hard look. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” He took a deep breath. “Darn it, I know this subject is supposed to be off-limits. Always has been. I can feel it every time I get even close. But I’ve just learned a lot about how short life can be, you know?”
Tom didn’t answer.
“Well, it is,” Jacob went on doggedly. “And so it’s stupid to avoid talking about things that matter. If I had Lillith back, you know what I’d do? I’d spend every minute just talking to her. Just telling her how I feel, and finding out what matters to her. I’d never go to an office again.”
Tom tried to chuckle. “That might be a little hard on the budget.”
“Screw the budget.” Jacob shook his head. “We’ve got enough money. Why did we think there should always be more?”
Tom was silent a moment. The priest’s voice drifted sonorously over the gentle air, reaching them as pure feeling, no content. The feeling was peace. Comfort. Forgiveness.
For that one moment, Tom could almost believe such things existed, even for people like him. After all, it must be for people like him that the concept had been invented. If you’d never done anything bad, you wouldn’t need forgiveness, would you?
“I guess it is partly Sophie,” Tom said. “I came so close to making a terrible mistake. I loathe the idea of making another one.”
Jacob nodded. “I can see that.” He paused, and Tom could tell he was trying to decide how far to push. “Did you—did you ever love her in the first place?”
“Jacob,” Tom said. “I’m not going to do this.”
“I guess that’s my answer.” Jacob sighed. “Have you ever been in love with anybody?”
Tom tapped his foot, a small movement that barely disturbed the yellow leaves that had fallen into the mulch around the bench. Though the cemetery was wide and open, the breezes fresh, he had begun to feel claustrophobic.
Had he ever been in love? What kind of question was that? For a few days, ten years ago, he’d been obsessed with Kelly Carpenter. He had hungered for her like an animal. When he’d looked at her, he’d felt as if someone had tied his intestines into knots and beaten his chest with a mallet.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kathleen-o-brien/happily-never-after-39878096/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Kathleen OBrien
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Members of the wedding party are starting to die.No one could believe that Thomas Beckham was the kind of man to leave a woman at the altar, but he couldn′t marry his bride-to-be. Not after what he′d seen her do. His only choice was to leave and never look back–and to keep to himself everything he′d witnessed.After the wedding-that-wasn′t, everyone, including Kelly Ralston, went on to other things. Or so it had always seemed. But ten years later, Kelly finds herself attending the funeral of another one of the bridesmaids–the third member of the wedding party to meet a tragic death. Kelly can′t help but wonder if the deaths are a coincidence. Or are they linked? If so, who will be targeted next?Thomas Beckham may be her only chance to find the killer. Before the killer finds her…