Cody watched me intently as he talked, a worried expression on his face. “Everything she’s told you is the truth, Alix. I’ve spent the last week checking all the details. Liz knew what had happened. I guess Nick told her. And because she didn’t want Frank’s murder pinned on Lindsey, she took her to the hospital in Paragould. The doctors there notified the Green County Sheriff, but they had no way of knowing about Frank, and probably wouldn’t have connected his death with a rape if they had. Lindsey couldn’t tell them what happened, and Liz wouldn’t. They eventually chalked it up as an unsolvable rape and closed the case. I’ve talked to the doctors, and the sheriff, to Liz and even Nick. There’s no doubt it was self-defense.”
My head was spinning like I’d drunk a gallon of wine, waves of dizziness rolling over me until I could barely stay in the chair. I’d been braced to hear Frank raped her. What I hadn’t expected was to discover that Nick had lied about killing his father.
That’s when my feelings started to change. Up to that point, I was consumed with guilt and feelings of pity for Lindsey. No woman deserved to go through what she had, and it was partially my fault. But now, anger built slowly inside me, helping me get a grip on my emotions. I leaned forward and crossed my arms on the desk.
“You were pregnant. Daniel isn’t Nick’s son, he’s his brother.”
“Yes.” Lindsey took over the story again. “Mama was the first to realize I was pregnant, but she didn’t tell me. I think she was afraid of what I’d do. By then, I was finally starting to recover physically from the rape, but I still wasn’t mentally stable. So she found out where they’d sent Nick and called him. Together, they decided that Nick would claim me as his step-sister on his army records. Mama couldn’t afford a hospital for me, and the army had good ones. If Nick was my sole support, I could be treated for free as his dependant. They also decided it would be better not to tell me about the baby until I was safely admitted with people around who could watch me.”
When Lindsey hesitated, Cody jumped in again. “They waited until Nick was almost done with basic training, then Liz put Lindsey on a bus for Kentucky. Liz was afraid people would start asking questions, so she reported Lindsey missing. Meanwhile, Nick had done all the paperwork and everything was ready. He picked her up at the bus station and took her straight to the hospital.”
“And it’s a good thing he did,” Lindsey said. “When they told me I was pregnant, I really went off the deep end. I couldn’t stand the thought of having part of Frank Anderson inside me. It was like being raped all over again, with no way to stop it this time.”
She looked down at her hands, and I noticed she was once again wearing long sleeves.
“I tried to kill myself. Every time they left me alone for more than a minute, I’d try. I hated the baby. If the only way to get rid of it was to kill myself, then that’s what I thought I had to do. Until the baby came, they put me on a twenty-four hour suicide watch. Then, when he was born, I refused to even look at him. I didn’t care what happened to him.”
Cody put his arm around her shoulders. “Nick took full responsibility for Daniel. When Lindsey signed away all her paternal rights, Nick adopted him. You’ve meet Bowie Grant?”
I nodded.
“Well, Nick met Bowie when he was visiting Lindsey at the hospital. Bowie was retired with no family, and he sort of took Nick under his wing. When Daniel arrived, Bowie moved in with them and took care of the baby while Nick was working. Lindsey stayed in the army hospital for the next four years, until Nick’s service was up.”
She nodded. “After the baby arrived, they were able to start me on a program of medication, and gradually I began to get better, although I was still a long way from being normal. By the time Nick took the job with oil company, the doctors had decided I’d progressed enough to leave the hospital and live alone. So I went with them when they moved to Saudi. But I still could barely stand the sight of Daniel. I’m not proud of it, but I couldn’t seem to help it. When I looked at him, I didn’t see Daniel. I saw Frank.”
My palms were slick with sweat, and I brushed them against my legs as I leaned back. “But you must have lived with them?”
“No. Nick made arrangements with the company so I’d have my own apartment. I was still seeing a psychiatrist, and once Daniel started school, Bowie kind of took over the job of taking care of me.”
I tried to relax, but the longer we talked, the angrier I became, and the more I tensed. “Daniel said you had to talk Nick into coming home.”
Her eyes got a faraway look in them and she smiled sadly. “Poor Nick. He was trying to protect both me and Daniel, even though he was miserable. We all knew he couldn’t forget you, that he still loved you. I couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t bear to let it continue. Guilt was eating me alive. I knew that if any of us wanted a chance at a normal life, I had to come back and face the past. I had to put things right.”
“What will you do now?” I forced my hands together in my lap.
Her gaze refocused and met mine. “I had planned to go live with my mother a while, but Cody convinced me to stay. You see, Daniel doesn’t know the truth yet. He still thinks Nick shot Frank. I don’t know how he’ll he react when he finds out what really happened, but he deserves to know why his mother ignored him all this time. And I really do want the chance to try and get to know my son.”
They didn’t stay long after that. I walked them to the door and unlocked it to let them out, my anger barely contained. On the threshold, Lindsey stopped and put her hand on my arm. “Please, forgive Nick. He loves you so much, and was so afraid that you’d hate him when you discovered the truth.”
I didn’t answer her, and her hand fell away, a look of sadness in her eyes.
“Are you going to be okay?” Cody asked.
“I’m fine.” My calm tone hid the turmoil that boiled inside me.
“If you need me—“
“I’ll call,” I interrupted. I wanted them gone, out of my store, out of my sight.
I locked the door behind them and returned to my office, the rest of the store dark around me. Slowly, I sank onto my chair and buried my face in my hands. Time crawled by as I sat there, going over every detail of what I’d heard. And with every tick of the clock, my rage grew.
I know what you’re thinking. Any rational person would be thrilled that Nick had finally been exonerated. Any rational woman would be delirious with happiness to discover the man she loved hadn’t cheated on her after all, that he really had loved her.
But I wasn’t rational.
You have to remember that for fifteen years I’d worked hard to make myself hate Nick. For fifteen years I’d blamed him for Katie’s death. For fifteen long, agonizing years I’d blamed him for not wanting me. The only thing I hadn’t blamed him for was leaving. For leaving me, yes. But not for leaving. I’d thought he had no choice, that he’d been forced into it.
Now I knew better, and it was worse than I’d ever believed possible. All those old feelings swamped me, pulling me down until I was drowning in them.
Because he’d had a choice. He could have told the truth and stayed here, gotten help for Lindsey. No one would have subjected her to arrest after what she’d went through. He could have trusted me enough to tell me what was going on from the beginning. If he had, I might have been able to help, to stop the chain of the events that took place.
But he hadn’t. He’d chosen to take the blame for Frank’s death, and leave me all alone. He’d chosen to protect Lindsey and her child, a child of rape, while my child was left to die.
The pain and grief of Katie’s death hit me as if it had happened only yesterday. It felt like someone had torn my chest open and pulled my heart out. And my rage grew. Out of all proportion, it grew until I was shaking with it.
I didn’t leave the store until the sun was setting. If anyone had seen me, stopped to talk with me, I would have appeared calm. Unnaturally so. But it would have been the farthest thing from the truth. There was only on
e thing I could think about now, one thing I wanted.
I wanted to hurt Nick the way he’d hurt me. I wanted him to feel exactly what I was feeling, and know he’d done this to me. And then I never wanted to see him again.
His truck was the only one parked in front of the house he was building, but for the moment I paid no attention. There was something else I had to do before I confronted him.
I flipped on the lights in the front of the barn as I went through, then headed back to my room. Once inside, I grabbed a chair from the table and pulled it to the linen closet. Standing on the seat, I reached far into the darkness of the top shelf until my fingers closed around the box hidden there. I opened the lid and removed the contents, letting the empty box fall to the floor.
Over the years, one of stalls had become a depository for various tools, things that were rarely used anymore. I rummaged though the pile until I found what I was looking for. A rusty old sledge hammer. Laying the heart-shaped pendant that bore both my name and Nick’s on an anvil, I lifted the hammer over my head and brought it down with all my strength. Again and again, I pounded it, until the shape was unrecognizable. And then I picked up the misshapen lump of metal and turned.
Nick was standing behind me, his face pale in the overhead lights. “You know.”
I wiped the sweat from my forehead with one hand. “Yes, I know.”
“Damn Lindsey to hell.” He took a step closer. “I wanted to tell you myself, to try and make you understand—”
“Stop right there.” My voice was cold. “I don’t want to hear any of your excuses.”
“Alix, please—”
“You bastard,” I whispered as fury shattered my icy demeanor. I threw the pendant at him, unable to stand its touch another second. It hit his arm and bounced to one side. “Did you know I went to your father’s funeral? I went because I wanted to tell him that you were better than he was, that you could never be like him.”
A laugh tore its way from deep inside me, a laugh born of anguish and anger. “You really had me fooled.”
“Alix.” It was a choked, desperate plea, but I wouldn’t listen.
“Let me tell you exactly what happened after you decided your slimy nobility was more important to you than I was. Two weeks after you left, I discovered I was pregnant, Nick. Pregnant with your baby. And God, I was so scared, but I was happy too. Happy because I had a part of you no one could take away from me. Scared because I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to hurt my family.”
What little blood was left in his face drained away, leaving his eyes like two dark pits staring at me in shock. “Oh, God.”
“You can forget about calling on God,” I said furiously. “He never cared anymore than you did.”
Only anger kept me going, kept me talking. A red haze of violence covered my eyes until it affected every thing I saw. Needing an outlet for the raw agony coursing through me, I paced up and down in front of him.
“Hugh found out I was pregnant, and asked me to marry him anyway. I didn’t know what else to do so I said yes. I didn’t love him, but I was willing to live with him to give your child a name. And he was willing to take on the responsibility you didn’t want. He claimed the baby as his own, and in his way, he loved her as much as I did.”
I whirled to face him. “That’s right, Nick. We had a daughter. A beautiful little girl who was your mirror image. She was my life, the only thing I cared about after you left.”
In a surge of outrage, I put my hand on his chest and shoved. “So tell me,” I snarled. “Where were you when she died? Were you visiting Lindsey in the hospital? Were you busy changing Daniels diapers, laughing with him? Loving him while Katie died alone without ever knowing her father? What were you doing when I needed you so desperately, when I went through the hell of her dying without you?”
It was the first time in my life I’ve ever seen a person crumble so completely, and I hope to God I never have to see it again. Right before my eyes Nick aged twenty years. His expression was one of such overwhelming horror and grief that it still haunts me, and his entire body seemed to fold in on itself.
Shoulders slumped, he lifted his hands and covered his face, his frame shaking in hard jerks. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice ragged with pain. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
So I did what I’d set out to do that night. I destroyed Nick without a qualm or a single feeling of remorse. I crushed him like a bug under the heel of my torment. And when it was done, all I had left was emptiness.
Wearily, I gestured toward the door. “Just go. Get out of my sight.”
Without another word, he turned and left, stumbling like an old man as he vanished into the night.
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring blankly at the walls, drained of all emotion and tired down to my soul. The cats finally brought me back to myself, winding their way around my ankles, crying for attention.
Only then did I turn back to my room. I walked inside, took an overnight case from the closet and began to cram clothes in haphazardly. I didn’t know where I was going, I only knew I couldn’t stay here. Not in the room that held so many memories, the room where Nick and I had made love. Had it only been last night? It felt like centuries ago.
I ended up at my Uncle Vern’s cabin in Hardy. Don’t ask me why, because I have no answer for you. One look at my face must have been enough for him. He opened the door and let me in, and never once questioned my arrival. I swore him to secrecy and spent the next week sleeping or sitting on the banks of Spring River, staring into the icy water. Occasionally, he’d put food in front of me, but I rarely touched it.
Who knows? If Jenna hadn’t found me, I might still be there.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mammoth Springs, the source of Spring River, was just across the Arkansas state line from Hardy, in Missouri. The water pouring from the underground springs was icy cold, and when mixed with the warmer air above, a night-time fog was the usual results. It hung over the river eerily, seething like a living creature, until the sun burned it off, giving Uncle Vern’s backyard a mystical, fairy tale appearance.
I woke early Saturday morning, before dawn, to the sound of my uncle rummaging in the hall closet for his fishing gear. Quietly, I listened to the front door close and the sound of his truck starting, then slid from the bed. Pulling on a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt, I padded barefoot to the kitchen.
The coffee was still hot, so I poured a cup, snagged one of Uncle Vern’s flannel shirts to ward off the early morning chill, and walked down to the river. Sitting on the bank, sipping coffee, I watched the sun come up over the mountains and let the peace soak into me.
The gurgle of the river was soothing, almost hypnotic. The first rays of light broke through the fog, turning dew-drenched spider webs into jeweled delicacies of extraordinary beauty. Across the river, a doe stepped hesitantly to the water, a half-grown fawn by her side.
She froze when she saw me, head high, long ears flicking in my direction. For a moment we stared at each other, but when I didn’t move she decided I wasn’t a threat. Lowering her head to the water, she drank while a red fox squirrel scolded from a tree. Water dripped from her muzzle when she lifted her head again, and she kept an eye on me as the fawn, at some silent signal, took his turn at the river. Then they both vanished into the woods like ghosts, leaving me to wonder if I’d dreamed them.
I continued to sit there long after my coffee was gone, long after the fog had thinned away into nothingness. Sunlight glinted off the silvery scales of trout, leaping from the rapids in pursuit of the insects that hovered above the water, captured my attention. And gradually, I became aware that I was feeling something.
Or maybe it was a lack of something I felt. Because for the first time since Katie died, the pain was gone. There was no anger left inside me. It was as if it had been burned away, leaving me clean and whole, like metal forged in a blast furnace.
I was pondering this amazing discovery when I heard the
soft sounds of footsteps coming down the path from the cabin. They stopped behind me.
“Mind if I join you?”
Carefully, I put my cup on the ground beside me. “How did you find me?”
Jenna’s flame-red hair came into view as she sat down, her gaze fixed on the river. “It hit me last night that this was the only place we hadn’t looked. I figured if I called, your uncle wouldn’t tell me the truth, so I drove up to see for myself.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I guess everyone is upset with me.”
“They’re scared. Cody told us what happened at the store. He blames himself for leaving you alone after that, but he said you seemed so calm that it didn’t occur to him you might do something drastic.”
When I didn’t say anything, she assumed a pose identical to mine. “The Judge came home from the hospital a week ago Friday, and your Aunt Jane has been handling things at Southern Supply. Kenny says she’s pretty good at it. You might want to consider keeping her on as an assistant when you get back.”
She moved her head just enough to see me from the corner or her eyes. “Bowie brought your car back. He says it should run fine now.”
I lowered my forehead to my knees. “And Nick?” I was sure feeling something now. Horror at what I’d done to him, to us, and the realization that I could never take those words back.
“I don’t know. No one has seen him. He’s even stopped work on the house.”
We fell quiet for a few minutes, each of lost in our own thoughts. Jenna was the one who broke the silence.
“Do you hate me? I know what you’re thinking, but I swear, Alix, I wasn’t using you.”
“I know.”
She finally looked at me, surprised. “You do?”
I raised my head and nodded. “After I had time to think about it, I realized I was more shocked and upset because I hadn’t figured it out sooner than because of what you did.” Shifting slightly, I faced her. “You love him.”