Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (18 page)

Within the master suite, the lamp in the far corner of the bedroom is on, draped with a sheer scarf the way it always is, but his attention is drawn to the dressing room and the bath beyond. Lights are on in both rooms and both rooms look like they’ve been ransacked by professional raccoons. Drawers and cabinets are left open, trailing all manner of contents.

He turns back to the dimly lit bedroom with every intention of waking Laurel and demanding an explanation. The bed, when he approaches it, is in complete disarray and unoccupied.

“What the fuck,” he mutters and takes another look at the dressing room and bath, as though he may have overlooked her in the jumble. She never stays up past eleven now that she feels more and more pregnant every day. If she was hungry, he would have seen her in the kitchen; if one of the lads needed her she would have alerted him when he passed their rooms. If she—a noise from above interrupts his reasoning. It sounded for all the world like someone just slammed shut the heavy door to the attic. At this hour of the night that sound is more disturbing than anything else taken in so far.

Without considering that someone other than Laurel could have made the sound, he sets off for the third floor at a run. He takes the stairs two at a time, virtually collides with Laurel at the top.

“What in
hell
were you doing in the attic at this hour?”

Laurel tries for nonchalant, fails to achieve it with arms held behind her, hands hidden from view. “I . . . I was looking for something,” she says.

“No shit. I rather got that idea from the areas laid waste in our bedroom. I hope the attic fared better. And I hope you found whatever you were looking for so we can be spared further disturbance and—”

“There is absolutely no need for you take that tone with me. I didn’t disturb your precious attic so you—”

“
My
precious attic? You’re the one that goes up there every chance like it’s your own personal bolt hole.”

“I do not. I’ve been up there exactly once since we returned from the States and you’re hardly the one to talk about personal bolt holes when you run off to that goddammed studio every chance
you
get.”

“That goddammed studio’s my workplace in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, I’ve noticed all right. I’ve noticed when you go off to supposedly
work
there when you’re trying to avoid something—”

“What are you hiding behind your back?”

“Nothing.”

“Let me see.” He reaches for her, she twists away.

The top of a staircase is no place for an argument to become even remotely physical, so he backs off, backs down a few steps. With great reluctance she relents and lets him see what she was so desperate to find at half after midnight.

“My sponge bag? My bleedin’
sponge
bag?”

Laurel sits down on the top step, gathers the skirt of her long nightgown close round her ankles and hugs the well-traveled bag to her breasts.

“You going somewhere you need to take shaving gear? What’s going on? Is this some side effect of pregnancy I don’t know about? I don’t get it, Laurel, I don’t get it at all.”

“I . . . I just wanted to be sure the bag had been wiped out after the last trip. I got to thinking that something might have spilled . . . that you might not have noticed . . . and put it away damp . . . mildew, you know and—”

“And the mildew police could’ve paid a surprise visit and there would’ve been hell to pay, not to mention the fines. Hand it over, then.”

After a weighty moment she complies. He unzips the bag to show her that it was indeed wiped out after its last use; he holds it out to her, demands that she sniff the odorless mold-free interior that was properly aired before being stowed in the attic.

“When am I gonna hear what this is
really
about? I rather doubt it’s my hygiene habits and now you’ve got me doubting all this . . . this excessive solicitude you’ve been showing me lately is strictly about finding words to live by from the vast supply Rayce left behind. Maybe you’d better tell me what’s behind all
that
shit while you’re at it.”

“It’s not shit,” she says in a small voice. “None of it’s shit. You’ll see.”

She steps past him without a word, dutifully grasps the handrail and descends the stairs at a sensible pace rather than by the headlong dash that might seem more natural in the middle of a row.

“Where’re you going now?” he calls after her when she doesn’t stop at the second floor as expected.

“To get that decanter of whiskey you were working on before you hid out in the studio.”

“
You’re
not wanting a drink are you?”

“Of course not, the whiskey’s for you,” she says and moves beyond earshot.

The need for strong drink aside, he can gauge the dread he should feel for what’s coming by the way she distances herself from him when she returns with the decanter and a tumbler. She won’t look at him directly and she won’t sit with him at the small table in front of the fireplace where they sometimes take their evening meals—where he’s now expected to drink the whiskey. She won’t even sit on the small couch she favors on other occasions, but instead retreats to a straight back chair that normally functions as a catchall next to the hallway door.

She clears her throat, flickers her gaze over him before fixing on a spot somewhere above his head. “The day Nate went to my house in New Jersey to get my father’s burial clothes,” she begins, then interrupts herself to say that Nate got a lot more than bargained for. “We both got a lot more than bargained for that day,” she warns before launching into an account of that day that soon has him reeling in his chair.

When she gets to the hard parts—the worst parts—her delivery goes flat like she’s told the story before or maybe rehearsed telling it. When she reaches the inarguable conclusion about how Rayce died, he motions for her to go quiet while it hits him—sweeps over him in a suffocating wave of grief.

To her credit, she doesn’t ask if he’s all right—any bloody fool could see that he’s not—or wonder aloud if he’s about to lift off for another visit to inner space. She waits a decent interval before resuming with the obvious—that the investigation has already established an incontrovertible link between Rayce’s death and her father’s.

“I’ve known since that link was made that my days were numbered—that I was going to have to tell. I’ve known that I was going to have to tell you, but lord knows I didn’t want to. I didn’t want you to suffer any more than you already have. I was wrong to keep this from you—from you and from the authorities, but I couldn’t help it. No minute has gone by that I didn’t want to do the right thing, but I was weak. I was weak, Colin, and I’m terribly,
terribly
sorry.”

He watches her literally brace herself for his reaction. Does she think he’s going to strike her, for fuck sake? Does she think he’s going to mount a verbal attack? Does she actually believe he’s capable of speech at this point? Does she have any idea how disappointed he is in her for holding out on him, for shielding him, for pampering him?

Facing this disappointment is almost as bad as facing his undeniable complicity in Rayce’s death. He would say exactly that to her if he could find his voice—if he could ignore how impossibly excruciatingly fucking lovely she looks at the moment.

Laurel, in her simple nightdress with her hair fallen loose about her shoulders, her dark eyes gone wide with apprehension, and that indescribable pregnancy glow upon her, is lovelier right now than the day he first laid eyes on her, lovelier than she was on their wedding day. But this is a different sort of loveliness she’s wearing now. This is a pared down sort of loveliness lacking the protective hauteur of the first encounter and the joyous confidence she brought to the marriage ceremony and he’ll be goddammed if he’ll let it get to him.

“And this!” He finds his voice, lofts the whiskey decanter and slams it down so hard the stopper pops out. “You
further
insult me by implying I can’t bear up without a crutch of some kind,” he says as though he’d actually enunciated all the other ways she’s insulted him. He picks up the one object on the table that’s safe to throw, thinks better of it and only drops the sponge bag to the floor. “I’ll assume you were gonna get rid of that in case it still contained a few telltale grains of coke.”

“No, quite the opposite. I was going to—”

“Save it, I don’t want to hear anymore. And don’t wait up. I won’t be back. Not tonight, at any rate.”

“Very well.” She abandons her seat next to the hallway door, saving him the bother of brushing past her as he would one of the hounds. She disappears into the bath, robbing him of the chance to say a lot of shit he’d probably regret at some point.

On the way back to the studio he debates to what extent Nate will be held responsible for this major sin of omission. No matter what Laurel said about the cover-up coming at her behest, he’d still like to have Nate’s arse for going along with it. And what of Amanda, whom Laurel confessed only learnt of the plot by accident? Does she deserve to suffer for not coming forward? Do any of them deserve to suffer if he accepts the tiresome reason Laurel swore first Nate, then Amanda, to silence?

Can anyone justifiably be blamed for giving him the rubber glove treatment—to use David Sebastian’s coinage for the way skeptics to his recovery thought he should be handled? But when has understanding ever made that treatment more tolerable?

“Sod it! Sod ’em all!” he bellows at the door to the studio and goes inside without any pretense of working. He drops down on the couch he had installed for trysting with the muse and attempts to process what he’s learned.

“Rayce died
instead
of me, Rayce died
because
of me,” he repeats like an ostinato from Hell—like the similar chant taken up when David was killed in his place—like the variation on a theme intoned upon learning how and why Laurel’s father died.

If there is any relief in affirmation of his long-held belief that Rayce did not die by his own hand, it’s corrupted by the means of affirmation. By that, and by the agony of knowing the part he played in it. Working all this into his consciousness takes up the better part of an hour and saps his remaining energy. He can’t sleep, however; the best he can do is drowse for minutes at a time, then shudder awake whenever this new memory prods him.

He gets up once. To stretch his legs is the excuse he gives himself. He takes a quick look out the window facing the house—just to check that she turned off the attic lights, is the reason he gives himself. The attic is dark. So is the master bedroom. Pitch dark, it is.

Without analyzing if that bodes ill or well, he drifts off into another doze, a longer one that’s interrupted by the ringing of a phone he can’t readily be sure is in his head or on the worktable near the sofa.

“Sod it,” he mumbles when he sits up to determine it’s the actual phone that’s ringing. “I’m not givin’ in that easy,” he says when he sees by the little light burning on the phone console that the call is coming from the main house. The light blinks five or six more times before it goes dark and the ringing stops.

He turns inward on the couch, plasters himself against the cushions for warmth, and takes another go at attaining sleep. But he’s wide awake when the next intrusion comes; he’s on his feet peering out the window at the many lights burning in the main house when whoever’s crunching gravel on the footpath reaches the studio door and pounds on it for all he or she is worth.

In a replay of another memorable hotel interlude, Amanda pauses in the bathroom doorway of their suite at the Dorchester and drops the sheet that only half conceals her nakedness. If the fax Nate just harvested from the machine was from anyone but a New Jersey police detective, he’d let it go the way of the sheet and put his energies into reprising their Monday morning wake-up sex instead of reading the update.

“Hello?” she says when he’s not immediately forthcoming about what’s grabbed his attention. When he still doesn’t answer, she disappears into the bathroom for a moment and returns wearing a hotel robe and a determined expression.

He hands her the first page of the fax. She takes a quick look, sits down on the edge of the bed to take a longer look and frowns at the contents. “About time, don’t you think?” she says after she’s absorbed the gist of it.

“I sure as hell didn’t think it would take this long to verify that the same batch of blow killed both Rayce and Laurel’s father, if that’s what you mean.” Nate hands over the rest of the report, pulls on a pair of boxers and sits down beside her. “But maybe they stalled the lab results until they had a profile for Jakeway.”

“Profile?”

He indicates the page summarizing the FBI’s psychological analysis of Hoople Jakeway.

“Delusional . . . fixated on the unobtainable . . . obsessed . . . sexually repressed . . . misguided . . . vengeful . . . distorted . . . volatile . . . deprived, disadvantaged, and discriminated against.” Amanda picks out words and phrases they’ve both used to describe Jakeway at one time or another and taps the page with a critical finger. “Am I allowed to think this isn’t exactly news?”

“You’ve got my permission, nothing earthshaking there. But here, look at this.” He indicates another page. “It says here they’re going public with Jakeway’s name and description. That
is
news, good news.”