Julie walked slowly forward, her feet sinking into the deep wool pile of the pale green carpeting. On her left she saw brass handles on two of the mirrored panels and she gingerly pushed them open then drew in a startled breath at the sight of a vast marble-floored sky-lit bath that was divided precisely down the center by two long marble vanities with double sinks and a mirrored half wall above them. Each half of the bathroom had its own enormous shower stall enclosed in clear glass and its own marble tub with gold fittings.
Although the rest of the house could have been furnished to suit a man or a woman, there was no mistaking the feminine touches that had given this suite an aura of inviting opulence that would surely make a man feel as if he’d been invited into a woman’s private boudoir. Julie had read in some home furnishing magazine that married men who were confident of their own masculinity rarely objected to their wives’ desires for feminine bedrooms and, in fact, rather enjoyed the implied illicitness of invading a formerly “forbidden” domain. Until that moment, she’d thought the notion odd, but as she noted the subtle touches designed for a man like the huge bed and comfortable, overstuffed chairs by the hot tub, she decided the theory had definite merit.
She headed for the door to the walk-in closet that opened off the right half of the bathroom and went inside to look for the telephone. After a thorough and fruitless search of both closets and all the drawers in the bedroom, Julie yielded to temptation and borrowed a red silk Japanese kimono embroidered in gold threads from the woman’s closet. She chose that partly because it was sure to fit and partly because she had a helpless urge to look nice if Zack woke up before morning. She was tying the belt around her waist wondering where on earth he’d hidden the phone when she remembered the small closet in the hall, the one with a deadlock on it. She went straight to it and tried the knob, and when it proved to be locked tight, she tiptoed into her own bedroom. She found the key where she expected it to be—in the pocket of his soaked trousers.
The locked closet contained an enormous stock of wine and liquor and four telephones, which she found on the floor behind a case of Dom Perignon champagne, where Zack had hidden them.
Stifling an unexpected attack of nervousness, Julie took one of the phones into the living room, plugged it in, and sat down on the sofa, her legs curled beneath her, the phone in her lap. She’d already dialed half the long distance number when she realized the enormous mistake she was probably making, and she hastily slapped the receiver onto its cradle to disconnect the call. Since kidnapping was a federal offense—and Zack was an escaped murderer—it stood to reason that the FBI would probably be at her parents’ house, waiting for her to phone, so they could trace the call. At least, that’s what always happened in the movies. She’d already made her decision to stay here with Zack and to let God handle whatever came along, but she absolutely had to talk to her family and reassure them. Idly tracing the flamboyant gold peacock embroidered on the lap of her red kimono, she concentrated on how to accomplish her goal. Since she didn’t dare call family members, she had to reach someone else first, someone she could trust implicitly, someone who wouldn’t be flustered by the errand she was going to give them.
Julie ruled out the other teachers. They were terrific women, but they were more timid than daring, and they didn’t have the kind of panache required for the task. Suddenly she burst into a beaming smile and went for the little address book she carried in her purse. Opening it to C, she pulled the phone onto her lap and checked the home number she’d had for Katherine Cahill before Katherine had become Mrs. Ted Mathison. Earlier that month, Katherine had sent her a note asking if they could get together when she was in Keaton this week. With a satisfied chuckle, Julie decided Ted was going to be furious at her for sending Katherine back into the Mathison family’s midst, where he couldn’t avoid or ignore her . . . and Katherine was going to thank her for doing just that. “Katherine?” Julie said quickly as soon as the other woman answered the phone at her family’s house, “This is Julie. Don’t say anything unless you’re alone.”
“Julie! My God! Yes, I’m alone. My-my parents are in the Bahamas. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I swear I’m completely safe.” She paused to steady her nerves and then said, “Do you know if there are people—police or FBI agents, I mean—at my parents’ house?”
“They’re at your parents’ and asking questions all over town, too.”
“Look, I need to ask you a very important favor. You won’t be breaking the law, but you’ll have to agree to keep this call a secret from them.”
Katherine’s voice dropped to a teary whisper. “Julie, I’d do anything for you. I’m—I’m honored you called me— that you’re giving me a chance to repay you for all the things you did to try to stop Ted from divorcing me, for the way you’ve always stood by—” She brought herself up short just as Julie was about to interrupt her. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’d like you to get word to my parents and my brothers right away that I’m going to call you back in an hour so I can talk to them. Katherine, make absolutely certain you don’t do or say anything to alert the FBI. Act natural, get my family off alone, give them my message. You aren’t going to be intimidated by meeting FBI agents, are you?”
Katherine gave a sad little laugh. “As Ted used to very correctly point out—I was a spoiled little princess whose daddy made her believe she could do as she damned well pleased. Now, there is no way,” she finished with more humor, “that a few lowly FBI agents could possibly fluster a former princess like me. If they try,” she joked, “I’ll have Daddy call Senator Wilkins.”
“All right, great,” Julie said, smiling at the tone of reckless daring in Katherine’s voice, then she sobered, trying to phrase a warning that would deter Katherine as well as Julie’s family from possibly deciding it might be in Julie’s best interests to alert the FBI about Julie’s next call, regardless. “There’s one more thing: Make certain my family understands that I’m completely safe right now, but that if anyone traces this call, I’ll be in terrible danger. I—I can’t explain exactly what I mean—I don’t have time, and even if I did—”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me. I can tell from your voice that you’re all right, and that’s all that matters to me. As far as where you are . . . and who you’re with . . . I know that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing what you believe is the right thing. You are the best person I’ve ever known, Julie. I’d better get going. Call back in an hour.”
Julie lit the fire in the living room fireplace, then she paced back and forth in front of it, checking her watch, waiting impatiently for one hour to pass. Because of Katherine’s calm, unquestioning acceptance of everything Julie said, Julie wasn’t at all prepared for what happened when she made her second phone call. Her normally stoic father snatched up the Cahills’ phone on the first ring. “Yes? Who is this?”
“This is Julie, Dad,” she said, squeezing the telephone hard, “I’m okay. I’m fine—”
“Thank God!” he said, his voice hoarse and gruff with emotion, then he called out, “Mary, it’s Julie, and she’s okay. Ted, Carl—Julie’s on the phone, and she’s fine. Julie, we did what you said, we didn’t tell the FBI about this.”
Over a thousand miles away, Julie could hear several extension telephones being snatched off their cradles and a jumble of relieved, panicked voices, but over them all was Ted’s voice—calming, authoritative. “Quiet, everyone,” he ordered. “Julie, are you alone? Can you talk?” Before she could answer, he added, “That student of yours with the deep voice—Joe Bob Artis—he’s worried sick about you.”
For a split second Julie gaped in confusion at his opening topic and his use of a name she’d never heard of, then she muffled a nervous laugh as she understood that he’d used the wrong name intentionally. “You mean Willie,” she corrected. “And I really am alone, at least for the moment.”
“Thank God! Where are you, honey?”
; Julie’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. For the first time since she’d come to live with the Mathisons, she was going to lie to them, and despite the importance of her reason, she still dreaded it and felt ashamed. “I’m not certain exactly,” she evaded with a telltale awkwardness they had to have heard. “It’s—it’s cold here, though,” she provided lamely.
“What state are you in? Or are you in Canada?”
“I—I can’t say.”
“Benedict’s there, isn’t he!” Ted said, and the anger he was suppressing came bursting through. “That’s why you can’t say where you are. Put the bastard on the phone right now, Julie!”
“I can’t! Listen to me, everyone, I can’t stay on the phone, but I want you to believe me when I tell you that I’m not being mistreated in any way. Ted,” she said, trying somehow to communicate with the one person who would understand the law and, hopefully, that judicial mistakes could happen, “he didn’t kill anyone, I know he didn’t. The jury made a mistake, and so you can’t—we can’t—blame him for trying to escape.”
“A mistake!” Ted exploded. “Julie, don’t fall for that crap! He’s a convicted murderer and he is a kidnapper!”
“No! He didn’t intend to kidnap me. All he wanted was a car, you see, to get him away from Amarillo, and he’d fixed a flat tire on the Blazer, so naturally I offered him a ride. He would have let me go, but he couldn’t because I saw his map—”
“What map did you see, Julie? A map of what? Of where?”
“I have to go now,” she said miserably.
“Julie!” Reverend Mathison’s voice interrupted, “when are you coming back?”
“As soon as he’ll let me, no—as soon as I can. I—I have to go. Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this call.”
“We promise, and we love you, Julie,” Reverend Mathison said with touching, unconditional trust. “The whole town is praying for your safety.”
“Dad,” she said, because she couldn’t stop herself, “could you ask them to pray for his safety, too?”
“Have you lost your mind!” Ted burst out. “The man’s a convicted—” Julie didn’t hear the rest of what he said. She was already putting the receiver back in its cradle and blinking back tears of sorrow. By asking them to pray for her captor, she had inadvertently forced her family to assume that she was either Zachary Benedict’s dupe or his accomplice. Either one was a betrayal of everything they stood for and believed in, a betrayal of everything they’d believed of her, too. Shaking off the depression settling over her, Julie reminded herself that Zachary Benedict was innocent and that was what really mattered right now. Helping an innocent man to stay out of prison was not immoral or illegal, and it was not a betrayal of her family’s trust.
Getting up, she added wood to both fireplaces, put the phone back in the closet, then went into the kitchen and spent the next hour cleaning it up and then making homemade stew to warm her patient when he awoke. She was cutting up potatoes when she realized that if he knew she’d made a phone call, she’d have a difficult, if not impossible, time convincing him that her family and her former sister-in-law were trustworthy and wouldn’t tell the authorities she’d called. Since he already had enough to worry about, she decided not to tell him.
Finished, she wandered into the living room and sat down on the sofa, the radio still on in the kitchen so that she could hear if there was more news that would interest Zack.
It was funny, in an awful ironic sort of way, she thought with a rueful smile as she stretched out on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, all the years she’d spent behaving like Mary Poppins and never, ever straying from the straight and narrow path, only to come to this.
In high school, she’d had lots of friends who were boys, but she never let them become more than friends, and they’d seemed willing to accept that. They picked her up for football games, offered her rides to school, and included her in their raucous, laughing groups. In her senior year, Rob Kiefer, the school’s undisputed “hunk,” had thrown her into a quandary of longing and frustration by asking her to the prom. Julie’d had a secret crush on Rob for years, but she refused his coveted invitation anyway, because everyone said that Rob Kiefer could get a girl’s underwear off quicker than Mary Kostler could undress the mannequins in the window at Kostler’s Dress Shop.
Julie didn’t believe Rob would try anything with her because they were friends. She was also Reverend Mathison’s daughter, which gave her a certain “immunity” from unwanted passes, but she couldn’t go to the prom with Rob. Even though she was dying to say yes and even though he promised solemnly that he’d behave on prom night, she knew the whole school, and eventually the whole town, would assume that Reverend Mathison’s daughter had become another on the long list of Rob’s sexual conquests. Instead, Julie went to the prom with nice Bill Swensen, whose father was the school’s bandleader, and Rob escorted Denise Potter, one of the cheerleaders. That night, she’d watched in sublime misery as Rob, who was crowned king of the prom, leaned over and kissed his queen, Denise Potter.
Denise got pregnant that night. When the couple got married three months later and rented a dingy one-room apartment instead of going off to college as they’d planned, the entire town of Keaton knew why. Some of Keaton’s citizens pitied Denise, but most of them acted as if she’d invited it on herself by going near Rob Kiefer.
Julie felt irrationally responsible for the entire nightmare. The experience also caused her to reinforce her resolve to avoid trouble and scandal at all costs. In college, she steadfastly refused dates with Steve Baxter, even though she had a crush on him, because the handsome football player was a notorious flirt with a reputation for scoring in the bedroom even more often than he did on the football field. Steve, for reasons she never understood, spent almost two years pursuing her, appearing alone at social functions if he knew she was going to be there, staying at her side, and doing his sincere and charming best to convince her that she really was special to him. They laughed together, they talked for hours, but only in groups, because Julie adamantly refused to start dating him.
Now, as Julie compared her staid past to her chaotic present and uncertain future, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: In all these years, she hadn’t stepped out of line once because she didn’t want her family and the people in Keaton to think badly of her. Now that she was about to stray from the “straight and narrow path,” however, she wasn’t going to settle for some minor infraction of moral and social rules that would stir up a little gossip in Keaton. No indeed, not her, Julie thought wryly. What she was going to do was violate not only moral precepts, but probably the laws of the United States of America, and while she was doing that, the entire news media would be providing gossip about it for the entire world—just as they were already doing!
The moment of humor vanished and Julie looked somberly at her hands. From the time she went to live with the Mathisons, she’d chosen to make certain “sacrifices,” up to and including her decision to become a teacher, rather than pursuing another career that would have paid much more. And yet, each sacrifice invariably brought her such rich rewards that she always felt as if she received much more than she gave.
Now, she had the distinct feeling that fate was calling in her debts for a lifetime of unearned rewards. Zachary Benedict was as innocent of cold-blooded murder as she was, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was expected to do something about it.
Rolling over onto her side, she tucked her arm beneath the throw pillows, watching the flames leaping in the grate. Until the real murderer was discovered, no one in the world, including her parents, was going to condone anything she did from now on. Of course, once her family realized that Zack was innocent, they’d approve completely of everything she’d done and might yet have to do. Well, probably not everything, Julie thought. They wouldn’t approve of her falling in love with him so quickly, if what she felt for him was actually love, and they definitely wouldn’t approve of her sleeping with him. W
ith a mixture of quiet acceptance and nervous anticipation, Julie realized that loving him was actually out of her hands; sleeping with him was virtually a foregone conclusion unless he’d drastically changed his wishes since last night. Although, she rather hoped he’d give her a few days to know him better.
Beyond that, all she could do was try to guard her heart from needless pain and to refrain from doing or saying anything that would make her even more vulnerable to being hurt by him than she already was. She wasn’t an utter fool, after all. Long before Zachary Benedict had gone to prison, he’d lived in an elite world of luxury populated by glamorous, sophisticated people with notoriously loose morals and no code of personal conduct or ethics. She’d read enough about him in magazines before he went to prison to know that the man she was with in this secluded mountain retreat had once possessed fabulous homes and villas of his own, where he gave lavish parties attended not only by famous movie stars, but by international business tycoons, European royalty, and even the president of the United States.
He was not a comfortable, genial assistant pastor of a small town church.
Compared to him, Julie knew she was as naive and unsophisticated as the proverbial newborn babe.
30
IT WAS AFTER 10 P.M. WHEN she woke up with a confused start, a sofa pillow clutched to her chest. A slight movement off to her left caught her attention, and Julie quickly turned her head at the same time an amused male voice remarked, “A nurse who abandons her patient and falls asleep while on duty does not get paid her full rate.”
Julie’s “patient” was standing with his shoulder propped casually against the fireplace mantel and his arms crossed over his chest, watching her with a lazy smile. With his hair still damp from a shower and a cream chamois shirt that was open at the throat and tucked into fawn-colored trousers, he looked incredibly handsome, completely recovered . . . and very amused about something.