Authors: Jayne Ann Krentz
Luke came toward her, peeling off his windbreaker. When he got close, he yanked off her soaking trench coat and wrapped the light jacket around her.
“You gave me one hell of a scare,” he muttered, dragging her against his warm, hard frame. “When you didn’t answer your phone a few minutes ago, I went a little crazy.”
“Oh, God, Luke, I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.” She clung to him. “Is Webb dead?”
“Not yet.” His arm around her, he guided her back to where Sam was using his own shirt as a makeshift bandage to staunch the blood flowing from Webb’s midsection.
“Just called the aid car,” Sam said tonelessly.
“Are you both all right?” Irene asked, surveying Luke and Sam in turn.
Before either man could answer, Victor Webb groaned and opened his eyes. He squinted up at Sam, evidently trying to bring him into focus.
“Son,” he said in a grating whisper.
“Ryland isn’t here,” Sam responded without a flicker of emotion.
“You’re my son. You know that. Listen to me. What happened here will come down to our word against theirs.” Victor glanced at Luke and Irene and grimaced with pain and hatred. “They’re outsiders, and you’re the law here in Dunsley. And I’m Victor Webb. The locals will believe whatever we tell them.”
“Sorry, but that’s not how it’s going to be,” Sam said. He got slowly to his feet.
“You’re family, damn you.” Victor broke off, coughing blood. “When the chips are down, family takes care of its own.”
“I am taking care of my own,” Sam said quietly. “I’m arresting the man who murdered my niece.”
“Pamela was a cheap little tramp. Listen to me, Sam, I’ve got a plan. You’re going to take Ryland’s place. You’ll have to start small, naturally. A state office to begin with, but we can build you fast. No one outside Dunsley knows that you’re a Webb. You’ll be the heroic small-town chief of
police who helped take down a U.S. senator. The voters will love you. But first you’ve got to help me clean up this mess.”
“What I’ve got to do is my job. If Bob Thornhill had done his all those years ago, Pamela would still be alive.” Sam took a card out of his back pocket. “You have the right to remain silent—”
“Shut up, you ungrateful bastard,” Victor screamed. “My word is the one everyone will believe. I’m Victor Webb.”
“You’re right, Mr. Webb.” Irene picked up her handbag, reached inside and took out the recorder she had turned on when she pretended to fumble for her phone. “Your word is good enough to take to the bank around here.”
She switched on the recorder. There was no mistaking Webb’s harsh, angry voice coming from the machine.
“…If you had been in the house the night I did your parents, I would have taken care of you, too.…”
T
hat evening, after a late dinner, they went out onto the back porch of the cabin and stood looking at the lake. The air was chilled and clear, and the moon cast a cold white light across the dark water.
Irene pulled the collar of her coat up around her neck and leaned into Luke, seeking his heat. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her tightly against his side.
“When they take that bullet out of Victor Webb, they’re going to discover that it came from your gun, aren’t they?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t offer anything else.
“Did Sam fire his weapon?”
“No.” He was quiet for a moment. “It would have been a damn tough thing to do, firing a gun at your own father.”
“Even if he was a murderous sonofabitch.”
“Even if,” he agreed.
She shivered. “I’m glad you were with Sam this afternoon, or I probably wouldn’t be here now.”
“Don’t think about what might have happened. Think about what really did happen.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist. “What happened was that you saved my life.”
“I had a lot of help from you.” He bent his head and brushed his lips across her forehead. “If you hadn’t jumped off the dock into the lake—”
She tightened her arms around him. “Don’t think about what might have happened.”
“Okay, so much for discussing the past.” He turned her so that he could see her face. “Got any objection to talking about future possibilities?”
Joy bloomed through her. “No.”
“I’m thinking of selling the lodge.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ve heard Glaston Cove is a nice town. Got an active city council and a dandy little newspaper.”
“Picturesque, too. Perched on the cliffs overlooking a small, charming bay. It’s just the place for a writer, if you ask me.”
He eased his fingers through her hair. “I told you, I fell in love with you the day you walked into the lobby and asked if there was any room service available.”
“I thought you said you wanted to have sex with me the first time you saw me.”
“That, too.”
A deep sense of rightness warmed her all the way to her bones. “As I recall, you informed me that the goal of the management of the Sunrise on the Lake Lodge was to provide guests with a genuinely rustic experience. No room service, no TV, no pool, no workout facilities.”
He stopped her by putting his fingertips on her lips. “But you have to admit that management did provide certain other amenities that are not typically available even at the finer, five-star establishments.”
She smiled and kissed him lightly on his mouth. “This is true.”
“Management stands ready to continue providing said amenities.”
“Even though management is selling the property?”
“Yes.”
“How long do you think management would care to go on providing those amenities?”
“For the rest of our lives,” Luke said quietly. Absolute conviction rang in the words. “I know I’m rushing you, sweetheart, but I feel like I’ve been looking for you for a very, very long time. I love you. I will always love you. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. And I sure don’t want to waste another minute.”
“You aren’t the only one who has been searching for a future,” she said. “I love you, Luke Danner.”
His mouth came down on hers, sure and true and right.
A
long time later she stirred beside him in the cozy bed. “You really are going to sell the lodge?”
“Yes.”
“Might be tough to find a buyer for this place, especially at this time of year.”
“Already got a buyer.”
“Really? Who?”
“Maxine.”
“Luke, that’s a lovely idea. But she can’t possibly afford it.”
He turned over on the pillow and gathered her close. “We’ll work something out.”
S
eventeen years ago, I spent a lot of time convincing myself that there was no link between that damned phone call that I made to Victor Webb and the murders of your parents, Irene,” Sam said wearily. “Did a pretty good job of it, too.”
Luke turned away from the view outside Sam’s office window to watch Irene’s reaction. He wasn’t surprised when he saw the look of mingled sadness and compassion on her face.
It had been two days since Victor Webb was taken to the hospital that he had financed years earlier and placed under guard. In those forty-eight hours Irene had changed in some subtle ways. It was as if she no longer viewed the town of Dunsley through a dark lens, he decided. Much of the cautious reserve with which she had treated most of the locals had dissipated.
Maybe there was something to that old adage about the truth setting you free. Or maybe, in this case, the truth had simply made it possible for Irene to give the past a proper burial.
“I understand, Sam,” she said gently.
McPherson folded his hands very deliberately on top of
his desk. “Later, when the rumors started up about your mom having had an affair with someone in town, I told myself that might have been enough to push your dad over the edge. I knew that you and Elizabeth were the two most important things in the world to him.”
“Victor Webb must have been the one who planted those rumors,” Irene said. “It would have been easy enough for him to do, given his connections in this region.”
Sam nodded. “Got to admit that I had a bad time for a while after I found out that the file on the case had been destroyed. I think I knew, deep in my gut, that Bob Thornhill had engineered that little so-called accident.”
“As a favor to Victor Webb,” Irene said.
“It wasn’t a favor.” Luke went to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders. “He saw it as repaying a debt. Like so many other people in this town, he owed Victor Webb. Webb had paid for his wife’s medications.”
Sam exhaled heavily. “Hell, even if I had tried to reopen the case after I took over this job, I would have been looking at the wrong member of the family. When I did allow myself to speculate on who might have killed the Stensons, I always assumed the most likely suspect was Ryland.”
“But it was Victor you called that night,” Luke reminded him.
“Thing is, I never figured him for the killer.” Sam unfolded his hands and spread them wide. His eyes were bleak. “He never acknowledged me, but he was my dad.”
“Yes,” Irene said.
Sam scrubbed his face once with his right hand. “I considered the possibility that after I called Victor, he turned around and called Ryland to confront him about the accusation of incest. There was some logic to that. I thought it was possible that Ryland had, in turn, rushed up here to Dunsley to get rid of the Stensons before the scandal broke. But that was as far as I got with my theories. Like I said, I just didn’t want to go there.”
Luke looked at him. “I’ll bet Bob Thornhill wasn’t eager to go there, either.”
“No,” Sam admitted. “He was my new boss, and he had a lot of years of experience. I was twenty-three years old, and that was the first killing I’d ever seen. When Thornhill announced that it was a murder-suicide and closed the case, I was more than willing to go along.”
“As the new chief of police, Thornhill had no problem shutting down the investigation,” Irene said.
“It wasn’t like there was anyone in town who was going to argue that there was an unknown killer running loose in Dunsley,” Sam agreed.
Irene studied him. “You called Victor because you were sure that Pamela was lying about the abuse, didn’t you?”
Sam nodded. “I just couldn’t believe it. I knew Pamela was angry at Ryland because he’d forced her to go to that boarding school. I thought she was trying to punish him so she invented the tale about the incest.”
“What about the video? Did you think she faked it?”
“I didn’t know what was on that video. She wouldn’t tell me. She just kept saying it was bad. I wondered if maybe she’d caught Ryland having sex with someone from Dunsley or something along those lines. I was still pretty naive in those days. Just couldn’t believe that my older brother had abused his daughter. So, yeah, I called Victor.”
“What did he tell you?” Irene asked.
“He said he’d take care of things, the way he always did when there was a problem in the family. He reminded me of how he had always taken care of my mother.” Sam closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he looked straight at Irene. “He was in his office at the San Francisco store that day. Just a couple of hours away.”
There was a short, heavy silence. Luke squeezed Irene’s shoulders to reassure her and then went back to the window.
“He used an inflatable boat with an outboard motor each time he came to Dunsley to kill,” he said quietly. “Launched it in some deserted section of the lake. That way there was no risk that anyone would see him entering or leaving Dunsley. Probably didn’t worry at all about being seen when he murdered Hoyt Egan, though. No one at the apartment
complex would have recognized him. Hoyt would have opened the door to him.”
“Just as my parents did,” Irene said.
“I’m betting that he used drugs to kill Pamela’s mother all those years ago,” Sam said grimly. “When he decided to get rid of Pamela, he was forced to act quickly. He must have concluded that it would be easiest to use the same method. After all, he had already done the research.”
The certainty in Sam’s voice caused Luke to turn around. “You found some evidence?”
Sam’s mouth thinned. “I discovered an empty syringe in the glove compartment of my SUV this morning. Sent it off to a lab to run some tests on it. Expect they’ll find traces of whatever Victor used to kill Pamela.”