Clay (18 page)

Stretching out her arm, Janna found the driver-side door lock and released it just as he snatched open the door. He flung himself inside, inserted the key and turned it. The engine roared. Clay reversed out of the parking slot, then almost immediately stood on the brake so they skidded to a halt. He slammed the SUV into Drive and gunned the accelerator. They left the parking lot with a scream of tires and the stench of burning rubber.

J
anna pushed upright as the SUV swerved out of the hospital driveway and they took off down the dimly lighted road that led away from town. She twisted in the seat to look back, but saw no sign of a gunman. The only thing moving was a couple of med techs who ran out the front door of the hospital. No more shots sounded in the night.

She settled back, holding her seat with clenched fingers. As she glanced at Clay, she saw that he was watching the hospital and the road behind them in the rearview mirror, dividing his glances between it and the blacktop unreeling ahead of them.

“What was that all about?” she demanded in strained tones.

“You tell me.”

“Why would I know anything?

The look he gave her was sharp and not at all concerned with her comfort. “Just a guess.”

“Maybe we should go back? What if it’s some psycho who plans to shoot up the hospital? Lainey is in there.”

“He was firing at you. I’d just as soon not let him too close to his target again.”

Something in his voice suggested that he would have returned if he were alone, or most likely never left in the first place. She might have been grateful if she could believe the bullets were meant for her. “What makes you say that? I was already in my seat when the shooting began.”

“Whose side of the vehicle is full of holes?” he asked with inescapable logic. “How many of those holes were made after I ducked around to my side?”

“He might have been after anybody. It could be one of those stupid, random things where some crazy person goes over the edge and starts shooting at anything that moves.” She continued to argue because she couldn’t bring herself to admit that he was right. If the man in the woods had really targeted her, then there could be only one reason. And it wasn’t one she wanted to discuss with Clay, much less with the police who were sure to show up.

“The shots weren’t wild and the shooter was sane enough to keep hidden. Besides, the odds against dying while playing it smart are a lot lower than they are for being killed while acting dumb.”

She crossed her arms over her chest as a shiver rippled over her. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Doesn’t matter. It happened.” He reached for the cell phone that hung in a support attached to the dash and began to punch in numbers with his thumb.

“Wait! What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” His eyes were narrow as he waited for her answer, but at least he didn’t press the final button to send the call.

“If you’re reporting our part of this to Roan, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why is that?”

“Suppose whoever was out there was shooting at you? Suppose they think you’re interfering and decided to scare you off?”

“Your doctor friend, you mean.”

His voice was flat. It wasn’t surprising. She’d just suggested that any danger to him was unimportant. It hadn’t been her intention, but the result was the same. “I know you don’t think much of my—my arrangement with Dr. Gower, but I can’t just forget it after going this far.”

“You don’t have to go any farther.”

“But I’ve paid out so much.”

“And he still wants more. It’s crazy, Janna! It’s criminal.”

“It’s Lainey’s life! Don’t you care about that? Haven’t you seen how anything—a cold, a cut finger, too much fluid or not enough, a fright or upset—can become a life-and-death emergency?”

“There are other ways.”

“They don’t work for her! She’s your brother’s child, Clay. You’re her uncle. Doesn’t that matter?”

The look he gave her was murderous. “Of course it matters. Why the hell else do you think I let you keep me tied up for so long? It hurts in my gut every time I look at her. I’d do anything to help her. She’s like having a part of Matt back, or finding a part of myself”

He dropped the phone between his thighs then
reached into his T-shirt pocket. Taking a piece of paper from it, he spun it toward Janna. She reached to catch it, but missed. As it fluttered to the floorboard, she leaned to pick it up, staring at it in the greenish lights of the instrument panel.

Matt. Lainey’s father, in the photo that was her most prized possession. “Where did you get this?”

“Lainey.”

She had given the photo to Clay. Her voice a thread of sound, Janna said, “She thought this was you.”

“She wondered.”

Lainey had wondered, but she hadn’t asked her mother, hadn’t mentioned it at all. What else had her daughter told Clay Benedict in all those long hours they had spent together? What games of pretend had she played with the man who looked so much like her father? If she had made a substitute of him in her mind, what would happen when she lost him?

But there was more to this equation. If Clay had stayed because he knew about Lainey, what did that mean? He could have wanted more information, but it would have been simpler to just reveal that he knew the truth and ask for details. However, the Benedicts were big on family. They looked after their own. Matt’s father had wanted to separate Janna from Lainey by buying her child. Suppose what Clay wanted was simply to take her?

“If it matters so much to you,” she said finally, “I’d think you’d want her to have every chance to live.”

“That it matters so much is the reason I don’t want your precious Dr. Gower anywhere near her with a scalpel. His shady way of doing things will kill her as surely as her kidney disease.”

Doubt assaulted Janna, familiar yet almost crippling now, after seeing the boy on television that afternoon. “You don’t know that! There’s no way to know. But don’t you see that I have to try? If I do nothing and she dies then it’s all my fault.” Her voice broke on the words and she turned her head to stare out the windshield to hide the tears crowding into her eyes.

He was silent so long that she thought he wasn’t going to speak, then he said, “You think it’s your fault, her kidney disease? Janna, it can’t be. That’s impossible.”

“She had a virus. I thought it would go away, that it wasn’t serious. I didn’t have time to take her to the doctor. I had a commission to fulfill, a living to make, and would have lost a whole day sitting in some doctor’s waiting room. She’d always been so healthy, and I thought—” She stopped, swallowing against the hard, constrictive knot in her throat.

“All children have viruses. That Lainey’s turned into renal failure was a million-to-one chance, something you could never have guessed and even her pediatrician might have missed.”

“I’m her mother. I should have seen it sooner, and might have if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in other problems. Now there’s a chance that I can fix it. Don’t you see?”

“Yeah, I see.” He gave her a long, hard look and opened his mouth as if he meant to annihilate her. Then he closed his lips so tightly that they made a thin line. Reaching for the phone, he jammed it back into its dashboard holder then settled deeper into his seat. Controlling the SUV with one fist on the wheel, he sent it flying down the dark country road.

Janna didn’t know where they were going. She had been neatly separated from her daughter, had been shot at and was now headed out of Turn-Coupe at high speed with a man she barely knew. Suspicion invaded her mind. It occurred to her that the firing might have been meant to frighten her, to make her easier to control in a neat reversal of her kidnapping scenario. Clay could be abducting her right now without her realizing it. At any moment, he could turn to her and tell her that it was payback time.

Paranoid, the word should be her middle name. Clay wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t after everything they had been through in the past few days.

Could he?

She flicked a glance at him from the corners of her eyes. His face was set in stern lines and the dashlights reflected with a hard turquoise sheen in the blue of his eyes. He seemed remote, unapproachable, as if he might be turning over a problem in his mind with which he wanted no interference. It could be anything, she thought, from which of his cousin’s houses it might be best to dump her at, to where he could bury the body when he was done with her. Or it could be the recognition that he might make an excellent
candidate for a relative kidney donation for Lainey, and had come very close to being tapped for it with or without his permission. If he got that far, he should also work out that her wariness of him stemmed in large part from worry over whether he suspected that she might have been in discussion with Dr. Gower over that possibility, and what he would do about it.

From deep inside her rose the strong urge to abandon all her plans for Lainey and simply ask Clay to be tested as a legal kidney donor. It wasn’t the first time she’d wrestled with it; the impulse had been with her for hours, even days. What held her back was a multitude of reasons, beginning with the memory of his dismissal of it when her daughter had asked, and ending with the way he’d taken charge since they had left the camp. Behind them all was fear.

Family was everything to the Benedicts. They looked after their own. Clay disapproved of everything she’d tried to do for Lainey. He had given orders for her medical treatment as if it was his right. He’d called in his family for support, introducing Lainey to them with all the quiet ceremony of an initiation into the clan. With iron will cloaked in charm and concern, he’d separated her from her daughter this evening. And just now his voice had held the same implacable contempt that had sounded in his father’s nine years ago.

Suppose that, by some miracle, he agreed to be tested and was found to be a compatible donor? The sacrifice of a kidney would surely require a reward. What if he asked that Janna give up her daughter to
him? It was what his father had intended if she had been able to prove she was carrying Matt’s child. Clay’s own mother had been forced to leave her sons behind when she divorced his father, or so Denise had told her. It seemed like a pattern.

Lainey was all Janna had. Was it better for her to risk the clandestine surgery while remaining with her mother who knew exactly how to care for her, or to have the advantage of a legal transplant under Benedict protection? Janna didn’t know. She just didn’t know.

They sped past dilapidated gas stations, trailer homes with shiny trucks parked out front, rows of long chicken houses perched under security lights and farms with old white houses nestled under ancient oaks. The blacktop curved and turned through long wooded stretches where giant trees on either side made a tunnel of their branches, and passed one or two big old plantation houses set well back, almost hidden from view. They crossed several small bridges over nameless creeks and bayous, whipped past briar and plum thickets and made ditches full of ghostly black-eyed Susans wave in the wind of their passage.

Finally Clay turned the SUV onto a driveway of white gravel and oyster shell that crunched under the tires. They wound through grounds where huge live oaks and magnolias stood like dark, glassy-leafed sentinels on a spreading lawn, the lake beyond made a mirror for the rising moon, and the air smelled of unseen roses and a hint of basil. They rounded a
curve and his home that she’d glimpsed earlier, though without really seeing it, appeared before them.

It was a sprawling architectural mongrel that predated the Civil War by several decades. Its two-storied center section appeared oldest and hinted at late 1700s French West Indies influence. A wing in the neoclassical style of the 1850s flanked it on one side, and a long, barracklike addition of turn-of-the-century vintage stood at a right angle on the other. The gallery, or porch, on the bottom floor of the center section continued along the newer addition, and these two sections formed a protective corner for a combination garden and entrance court. Centered by a wrought-iron fountain that played a soft water tune as it fell into its basin, it was floored with tiles in the Moorish style and filled with a sprawl of roses, daylilies and verbena set off by the tropical foliage of canna and taro.

“Welcome to Grand Point,” Clay said as he pulled up on the driveway that curved in front of the house.

The casual tone of his voice was not quite enough to cover his pride and affection in the place. Janna didn’t blame him. His home, for all its amalgamation of styles and features, had an indefinable grace and an aura of sheltering comfort. Added to over many generations of growing families, it wasn’t small. Janna counted at least ten chimneys sprouting from its various sections, and guessed that there must be something like three dozen or more expansive rooms under the different rooflines.

Though she’d heard much about Grand Point over
the years, from Denise as well as Matt, she’d never expected to set foot in it. That she was here under the present circumstances left her as melancholy as she was awed. To cover her reaction, she asked, “Do all the Benedicts name their houses?”

“Seems a bit pretentious, doesn’t it? People seldom do that anymore, but it was common at one time.” He opened the driver side door and stepped out, moving around to the passenger side. She’d already lifted the handle and pushed it open, but he gave her his hand to help her make the long step down to the ground.

Keeping her voice as light as possible, she said, “I hope we aren’t disturbing anyone.”

“No one here to disturb.”

That was what she’d wanted to know, of course, but she wished he’d chosen another way to put it. “You live alone? I mean, it’s obviously an old family home, and you have brothers, I think.”

“A couple of them. We all share a legal interest in the place under Louisiana’s inheritance laws, but that’s about it. Adam, the oldest of us, says he’s had enough experience living in an old house to last a lifetime and much prefers modern glass and steel with all the latest conveniences. Wade likes the place well enough, but he’s a petroleum engineer working overseas so he comes and goes, mostly goes. I’m the only one who wants to live at Grand Point. At least for now.”

They moved across the courtyard as they talked, skirting the fountain and climbing the tiled steps to
pass under the dark shadow cast by the high porch ceiling. A double front door loomed in front of them. Clay unlocked the heavy right side and pushed it open, then reached inside to flip on a light switch. As he stepped back, Janna moved ahead of him into the house.