Stonebrook Cottage Page 20

  Eventually they sent him up to a private room, where plump, gray-haired Bea Jericho came in sobbing and yelling at him for not listening to her and staying away from that damn gravel pit, it was a death trap. Now look at him.

  Charlie griped because the nurses wouldn't let him smoke. "It's not like you're on oxygen and I'm going to blow up the place."

  Pete loved his parents but just wished they would leave. He couldn't make sense of anything. How did he fall? What happened?

  His mother seemed to sense his irritability and confusion. She took one of the tissues from his nightstand and wiped her tears. "You just rest, Pete. They want to keep you overnight at least. What were you doing up on that bank, anyway?"

  The tree house. He remembered now. Had he gone up there to dismantle it? The details wouldn't come, and he wondered if his father had told anyone about it and if so, would they all be in trouble now, him and Charlie and the kids.

  They had him hooked up to two IVs, one for fluids, one for pain medication. A doctor had told him he might not remember how he fell, it was okay, a normal short-circuiting of the short-term memory process. A chemical reaction while the body was under assault and pouring everything into staying alive.

  But he might remember more after the pain medication wore off. "It'll take time," the doctor said. "Be patient."

  A state trooper entered the room and said that Governor Stockwell was there to see him, if he was up to her visit. Charlie and Bea retreated, promising to bring him clean clothes later, but before he left, his father leaned over Pete and said in a low voice, "Nothing good comes from getting involved with a Stockwell. First Madeleine gets people to lie about a barroom fight, and now—look at yourself, son. You grew up in those woods. The hell you slipped and fell."

  Pete couldn't make sense of half of what his father said. "Pop…"

  "Don't worry. I'm keeping my mouth shut. That old bat isn't going to find some way to put you in jail for busting yourself up."

  He withdrew, and Pete sank his head into his pillow, no idea what the hell his father was talking about. How could he go to jail for falling?

  Allyson entered the room with the air of a governor about her, and Pete knew this was a visit from a concerned neighbor, not his lover. He didn't care. He was so damn happy to see her. He wished he could take the fear and worry from her beautiful eyes, but… fuck…he couldn't even stay awake.

  Sam's mood started to darken on the way back to Bluefield. Zoe West had snooped around the hospital, then took off, leaving him to his own devices to find a ride back to Bluefield. He got one with Kara, in Pete's truck. Charlie Jericho rode back with his wife, who apparently didn't let him behind the wheel of her car.

  Kara drove. She looked drained and tired, her dark eyes betraying her worry and tension. "This your first time driving a truck?" Sam asked her.

  "Shut up, Sam."

  Still some spark in her. That was good. "You want to talk?"

  "No."

  "Mike Parisi was murdered. You know that, don't you?"

  "It doesn't matter what we know," she said, her eyes focused on the road. "It only matters what we can prove. You know that."

  It was all she would say.

  Two minutes after they arrived back at the cottage, Hatch Corrigan and a state trooper delivered Henry and Lillian, obviously sticking to the original plan to spend some quality time with their godmother.

  Hatch reminded Kara that the private bodyguard would be starting in the morning. "I'll bring him by early."

  "When will Allyson be back from the hospital? I was hoping to have a chance to talk to her—"

  "Not today. She's very upset about what happened."

  Kara nodded. "We all are."

  But Hatch wasn't interested in anyone else, and he left.

  Kara set the kids up at the kitchen table with drawing supplies and answered their questions about Pete, and Sam could see this wasn't the time to grill Henry and Lillian about their tree house. It could wait. First he'd grill Kara. It probably wasn't the time for that, either, but he didn't care.

  She seemed to sense what was on his mind and blew out the back door and started heaping charcoal in the hibachi. He offered to help. She shook her head. So he sat in the shade and watched her.

  "Interesting scene at the hospital," he said.

  She squirted charcoal lighter fuel onto the coals from a rusted can she'd found under the sink. "People always act weird in hospitals."

  Sam didn't argue with her point. He tried to sort through the people he'd met since arriving in Bluefield, who they were, what they meant not only to Kara, but to the two towheads in the kitchen who were just trying to keep a grip on their lives. "No love lost between Charlie Jericho and Madeleine Stockwell, is there?"

  "On Charlie's part. I doubt Madeleine thinks enough about Charlie to like him or dislike him. He blames her for Pete going to jail. I represented him—"

  "Zoe West told me."

  "He thinks Madeleine got people to exaggerate their stories, if not outright lie."

  "What do you think?"

  "I think Pete tore up that bar and thought it'd be a just-between-us-boys deal and it wasn't." Kara set down her fuel can, very focused on her work. "I could have tried to tear apart the witnesses' stories on the stand, but we still had a guy with stitches. Even if the witnesses were exaggerating, Pete couldn't deny he hit someone with a beer bottle."

  Sam sat in the grass, extending his legs and leaning against his outstretched arms, imagining Kara in her twenties, trying to sort out lies from truth and be an advocate for her clients. "So the prosecutor offering to knock it down from felony assault to a misdemeanor was appropriate."

  "He never should have been charged with a felony, but if he'd gone to trial, he'd have been convicted. It was stupid. The whole thing was stupid, but there we were. I did my best."

  "I don't doubt it."

  She shot him a look, then gave a small smile. "Thanks."

  "Why would Madeleine Stockwell want Pete in jail?"

  "To put him in his place."

  "Because he was in love with Allyson," Sam said.

  Kara glanced around at him, the soft light of dusk bringing out the richness of her dark eyes. "Do you notice everything?"

  "He's still in love with her." Sam plucked a blade of grass and stuck the end in his mouth. "The governor and an ex-con. That might not go down well with the public. Or her advisers, her family. Governor Parisi. A lot of people she wants to please."

  "Pete served six months on a criminal misdemeanor. It's not like he killed people. He was twenty-five. He got into a bar fight." Kara set down her can of lighter fluid. "Anyway, Allyson doesn't think that way. If she wanted to see Pete, she would, and to hell with the rest of it."

  "Not everyone's looking for a soul mate. Sometimes," Sam went on, "the wrong people fall in love with each other."

  "I need matches."

  She spun on her heels and ran inside, returning a minute later with a box of short wooden matches. She tapped one out, but dropped it in the grass, and when she knelt on one knee to look for it, Sam could see she was ready to come apart. She located the fallen match, but it was wet. She tossed it onto the coals and tapped out another.

  "These people have a lot at stake, Kara. There are too many animosities and ambitions at work here that have nothing to do with you and who you are. You felt the undercurrents a year ago, and that's why you came home."

  "I wasn't running from anything." Her back was to him now, tense and unyielding but Sam could feel her vulnerability, her resistance to it. "I stayed out of the politics. Big Mike was complicated, a great guy, but I didn't see that much of him, especially after he was

  elected governor."

  "But he was in love with you," Sam said.

  "Half in love. It was just a romantic fantasy. I don't know, maybe he told me to make sure I didn't get cold feet and stay in Connecticut. Not that it made any difference. I came home because it's where I wanted to be."

  "Wha
t about Allyson?"

  "We'll be friends until we're a couple of white-haired old ladies, even if we don't see each other as often. And Hatch, Madeleine, Billie. The Jerichos. I guess in a way they were my northern family."

  "And you can't save any of them," Sam said, "any more than you could save your mother."

  At first he didn't think she'd react. She struck her match against the box, and when it didn't light, she threw it impatiently onto the coals and got out another. But she didn't strike it. She set the box on the table next to the hibachi and carefully laid the match on top of it so it wouldn't roll. Then she walked over into the shade and, without a word, slapped him across the face. Not as hard as she could have, but hard enough.

  Sam could have stopped her, but he didn't. And she'd known he wouldn't. "Tell me I'm wrong, Kara."

  She looked more shocked by what she'd done than anything. "I'm sorry. I had no right to hit you." She turned and walked back to her matches and her grill. "I'm staying until I know Henry and Lillian are safe." There was no anger in her voice, just fatigue and that unrelenting determination. "If someone killed Mike, I want his murderer found and brought to justice. It has nothing to do with my mother."

  Sam had no intention of letting her off the hook, never mind the sting of her slap, her resistance to what he had to say. "The state police and state's chief attorney are investigating. Tell them what you know and let them do their job." And he added, "If you don't, I will."

  "They're not a part of Allyson's inner circle. I am. I went away, so now I have some distance—but I still have a perspective they don't. And I have access."

  She'd looked around at him, reminding Sam of her brother the morning they'd driven through a blinding snowstorm to save his daughters from a murderer.

  "Damn, Kara." Sam saw it now. "You think someone in this inner circle is responsible for Parisi's death."

  She didn't say a word. She struck another match and tossed it onto the coals, jumping back as the flames shot up.

  Seventeen

  Kara lay awake in her dark bedroom, the moonlight creating eerie, shifting shadows as she listened to crickets and an owl outside in the woods and fields, the distant warble of wild turkeys. She tried to concentrate on these sounds and images instead of those in her head. Big Mike gasping for air, the doomed bluebird, Henry and Lillian watching in horror from their illicit tree house. She'd woken up abruptly from a nightmare in which she was the bluebird and Big Mike had died trying to save her, and it all got mixed up with that terrible day her mother was killed.

  Then she saw Pete Jericho lying in the gravel pit, bleeding and broken, and she heard his pain-wracked words. You always see me at my worst. She remembered him pacing in her office, already not entirely trusting her because she was young and female and not his idea of tough, a friend of the Stockwells, a lawyer Mike Parisi had recommended, a graduate of Yale. He knew nothing about her upbringing in south Texas or how hard she worked, and she saw no need to tell him.

  She blinked as if that might make the last vestiges of her nightmare go away, but it didn't. She wondered what time it was, if Sam had gone up to bed. She peered across the room to see if there was any light under her doorway. Maybe. She couldn't tell.

  After dinner, they'd all played a game of Risk. Sam was the first one out. He rose, gathering up his pieces. "There, you see? I don't want to rule the world all that much."

  They didn't finish the game and called it a draw. The kids just wanted to go to bed. Sam didn't bring up the subject of their tree house or how he planned to go to the Connecticut authorities in the morning with what he knew.

  Kara apologized again for slapping him, but he didn't apologize for his unfeeling remark. What did he know about her mother?

  Sinking back against her pillows, Kara ran her hand over her abdomen and breasts and imagined a baby growing inside her, a baby nursing, sleeping on her stomach. She remembered the soft skin and infant smells of her twin nieces and, later, her godchildren, their downy hair and tiny hands and feet, the new baby blankets and cute little outfits.

  She hadn't realized she'd gotten so caught up in her pregnancy fantasy and never guessed she'd be disappointed, almost bereft, when the test turned out negative. She thought she'd be relieved. An unplanned pregnancy was not what she needed in her life.

  She sighed, remembering Sam's response to her, her response to him, up against that oak tree today. If they hadn't come to their senses, she'd be buying more pregnancy tests in a few weeks.

  A crazy business for sure, she thought, if Sam Temple turned out to be her soul mate. A black-eyed Texas Ranger whose idea of compromise was that people didn't argue with him. Lord, what to do?

  But her body relaxed as she thought of him, and she must have drifted back to sleep because the smell of coffee woke her. She got cleaned up and dressed quickly, trying not to pay attention to her reflection in the bathroom mirror. But she caught a glimpse of herself in the bedroom mirror on her way out, and she saw the strain, the tension that had gripped her since Allyson's call the night of the Gordon Temple opening.

  Sam was easing onto a chair at the table when she went into the kitchen. He hadn't buttoned his shirt, and she remembered with a jolt how, sometime during their long night together, she'd run her tongue down his hard, dark abdomen, felt his sharp intake of air when she'd gone lower. Her boldness had surprised her—yet everything they did in those hours seemed right, as if a bond already existed between them, one that went beyond sex and time, at least in her own mind.

  He drawled a good morning, and she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across from him. He had the Colt in its holster, nothing about him casual. She needed to remember that. Sam Temple was sexy, witty, even cocky—but he was always serious when it came to violence, the potential for violence. Pete's accident yesterday, the tree house and seeing where Big Mike died would all have reminded Sam that this was not a normal summer weekend in the picturesque northwest Connecticut countryside.

  Henry wandered in looking for breakfast, and Sam helped him fry up some bacon. Lillian, off her vegetarian kick, asked for them to fry her some, too, then slid onto Kara's lap. "Will you help me fix my hair?"

  They retreated to the bathroom, where Kara combed Lillian's long blond hair and did her best to fashion it into a single braid down her back. "Did your mother fix your hair?" Lillian asked.

  "When I was a little girl, yes," Kara said. "She liked to put it into French braids."

  "She died, didn't she?"

  "We were in a car accident when I was nine and my brother was fifteen."

  "Do you still miss her?"

  "Yes."

  "Does it make you sad that she died?"

  "It did. I accept it now." Kara knew they weren't talking about her mother, but about Big Mike. "She's still a part of my life."

  "I talk to Big Mike sometimes," Lillian said.

  Kara smiled and kissed the top of her head. "He'd like that, don't you think?"

  "Henry says Pete fell from up at our tree house. He says we'll really get into trouble if people find out about it now."

  "Lillian, that's not true. You didn't commit a crime—"

  "We were trespassing. The tree house isn't on our land."

  "But you and Henry didn't push Pete."

  The girl shook her head solemnly. "We were swimming at Grandma's."

  "Then it'll be okay. Trust me. It's unrealistic to think people aren't going to find out about the tree house and figure out what you saw. They'll climb up there and realize you could see Mike's swimming pool—"

  But Lillian was done. "I don't think I want any toast with my bacon."

  Her braid was lopsided, but she didn't seem to mind and skipped back to the kitchen, instructing Sam and Henry on how she liked her bacon crisp not soppy. They all sat at the table, Sam with a fresh mug of coffee, and Henry asked Kara about the bodyguard Hatch had hired. "Lillian and I don't want a bodyguard," he said. "We're fine on our own."

  "Hatch and your mother will feel
better—"

  "Uncle Hatch will. Mom doesn't care. She just wants us to be quiet and perfect and not get in her way."

  "Is that why you haven't told her everything you told me?" Kara asked quietly.

  Henry refused to answer. Lillian said, "He's mad at Mom because she wouldn't let us go to the hospital and see Pete. She made us stay with Grandma and Uncle Hatch and that state trooper."

  "Kara and I were at the gravel pit yesterday." Sam sipped more of his coffee, his shirt still unbuttoned. Deceptively laid-back, he spoke calmly, without drama. "You know we're the ones who found Pete, right? Kara stayed with him, and I walked up to the top of the hill to see if I could figure out how he fell. I ran across your tree house."

  "Pete's going to be fine," Henry said and jumped up. "Come on, Lillian, let's go upstairs."

  She wrapped two pieces of bacon in a napkin and followed her brother out of the kitchen. Kara leaned back in her chair. "That went well."

  "I see what you're up against—they're just hearing what they want to hear." But Sam's mind was clearly elsewhere, and he set down his mug and placed one foot up on the opposite knee, his chair pushed back from the table. "Why two weeks before they took off from the ranch? Why not bolt the first week if it was because they were upset over seeing Parisi drown?"

  Kara went to the counter for more coffee.

  "There must have been a trigger that second week." He studied her, then took another swallow of coffee. "There was, wasn't there, Kara?"

  "Sam, I can't—"

  "You are not those kids' attorney. You're their godmother."

  "I know what I am."

  "I'm still going to the authorities."

  She nodded.

  They heard cars out on the dirt road, and Kara looked out the kitchen window and saw first Billie Corrigan pull up in her old station wagon, then Hatch in a sedan with a gray-haired man at the wheel. At first she didn't recognize him, but when he got out of the car, she winced. Of all the people he could have hired as Henry and Lillian's private bodyguard, Hatch had chosen Walter Harrison? Why? Wally was the off-duty Bluefield cop who'd wreaked such havoc on Pete Jericho's life.