Scandal in Copper Lake (24 page)

“And
lodge
isn’t a name.” Robbie tapped the paper. “Jeez, it’s a place—that old fishing camp of Cyrus’s upriver. Remember? Granddad used to call it a damn cabin just to get Cyrus’s nose out of joint.”

“Everyone called it a cabin except him.” Rick’s expression was grim as he locked gazes with his brother. “So Cyrus sets up a meeting. Glory goes. She’s found dead back in town, and her car is found in town, as well. Why? Why would a woman in her condition go for a walk at night along the river when it was cold and raining? Why would she drive past her house to the park when there’s a path to the river right beside her house?”

Anamaria moved her plate to the empty table beside them, unable to face the food any longer. Her stomach was knotted, her skin cold, and just the smell of food made her queasy. Because of the conversation? Because of the baby? Or because she
knew
more had happened that night than a walk.

“Her first appointment that evening was at Lydia’s house.” Her voice was low but steadier than she’d expected. “Lydia didn’t try to keep her meetings with Glory secret from the people close to her. Harrison, Sara and Kent knew about them. Kent spends a lot of time at their house. He was closer to them than to his own parents.”

“He could have seen her there that evening.” Robbie
clasped her hand in both of his. “He could have been waiting for her and followed her. And when he realized that she was going to meet his father…”

That would have brought out the rage, Anamaria acknowledged. Maybe Glory’s death had been accidental, or maybe it had been murder. Either way, one or both of her Calloway lovers had been involved. One of them had taken her baby. Her mother was dead because the passions she’d inspired had been too great, but her sister was alive. True to her name, Charlotte Duquesne had survived.

Abruptly Anamaria pushed back her chair, sprang to her feet and fled the dining room. She bypassed the ladies’ room and headed out the door, bumping into guests entering the restaurant, mumbling apologies as she stumbled down the steps. She walked with long steps, not slowing when Robbie called her name, not looking when running steps pounded behind her.

He caught up with her as she started to cross River Road, grabbing her arm, pulling her back as a car sped past, horn blaring. It would be so easy to go into his arms, right there on the main street in town, with people all around, but she didn’t…until he pulled her there. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly, and when she tried to point out that people could see, he shushed her.

When the shudders stopped rippling through her, when the sun had warmed the ice from her skin, she raised her head to gaze into his worried blue eyes. “I’m sorry. I just…it just got to be too much.”

“She’s your mother. Sometimes the rest of us forget that.”

“I want to know, but I don’t. Maybe I was better off not remembering anything.”

He cupped his palm to her cheek, tilting her head back. “You still remembered the night she died. You always remembered the vision you had of her. But you’d blocked out
the good memories, too, of baking cookies and walking in the rain and having picnics on that shawl of hers. You’d forgotten about her tucking you in bed, then crawling in beside you to read stories from that book you found in the chest. All of those things are worth remembering, Annie. Those are the kind of memories you treasure for a lifetime.”

The kind of memories she intended to make with her own daughter. The kind of memories, God help her, that she wanted Robbie to make with her, too. Fishing out on the river, tramping through the woods, giving her personal tours of the Calloway Plantation. He could teach their daughter what it was like to live in wealth, and Anamaria could remind her what it was like to live in slavery. And she would grow into a wise, understanding young woman—the best of both their worlds.

Rick and Amanda joined them, the latter carrying Anamaria’s purse. She handed it over with a hug. “Come to dinner tonight,” she murmured. “It’ll be good for you.”

Rick laid his hand on Robbie’s shoulder. “We’ll be at Mom’s, or I’ve got my cell if you need anything.”

“Thanks, bubba.”

Rick and Amanda went back the way they’d come. Robbie kept one arm around Anamaria and hustled her across the road to the car. “Well, Annie,” he said, reluctant to let go of her so she could get in. “There’s only one person left to talk to.”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “Kent.”

He nodded, too. “Are you up to it?”

“With you there? You bet.” It was mostly bravado, but she would find the courage. She always did.

A phone call to Kent’s house confirmed that he was out for the day. “Fishing,” Robbie said when he hung up. “That means he’s at the cabin. Excuse me, the lodge. How about I take you
out to Mom’s, and you spend some time getting acquainted with her and Amanda. Then I’ll pick you up on my way home.”

“You’re not going to talk to him without me.”

He was worried about her. She still looked pale, still troubled. She’d come to the conclusion back there in the deli that her mother’s death might not have been accidental—that even if the fall had been, either Cyrus or Kent, or maybe even both, had done nothing to help her. They had let her die.

She had come to Copper Lake looking for a few details about her mother’s last days, and she’d learned more than any daughter would want to know about her last night.

They followed River Road out of town, turning back west onto a narrow dirt road before they reached Calloway Plantation. The road was still muddy from the last rain, and he thought more than once that he should have borrowed Sara’s SUV. But they made it through the worst spots and were soon on the uphill slope to the cabin, built atop the riverbank.

Robbie saw no point to a fishing camp when the comforts of home were just a few miles away. Cyrus had seen no point to going home when he could bring the comforts to his camp. The log cabin was built of far more substance than most camps generally were, with a front porch running the length of the building and a back porch on stilts that stretched out over the river for easy fishing. The furniture inside was made of leather and wood, the rugs Navajo, the art fairly good. When Robbie was young, it had been used for entertaining out-of-town business associates, but most of the family had preferred to do their fishing from a boat or sitting on a quiet bank somewhere.

A black Escalade was parked in front of the cabin. Robbie pulled in next to it, got out and circled the car to help
Anamaria out. The scene was quiet—no television or music from inside, no rocking or conversation on the front porch.

They climbed the steps to the porch and he rang the doorbell, listening to it echo inside. Before it faded away, a board creaked to his left and Kent stepped around the corner.

“What do you want?”

Kent’s welcomes were never very welcoming. He disliked everyone to some extent, and he disliked Robbie and his brothers more. Maybe it was because they’d had a lousy father, too, but they hadn’t let it hold them back. Maybe because their mother
wasn’t
lousy. Sara had devoted herself to raising her kids, while Mary had just abandoned hers.

“Anamaria and I wanted to talk to you.”

Kent came a few steps closer, then eased one hip onto the porch railing. “I figured you’d come along eventually, if you were smart enough to figure it out.”

“We’ve figured out a few things.”

“Like what?”

Robbie faced Kent fully. “That Glory was your father’s mistress. That she was sleeping with you, too. That Cyrus got her pregnant.”

Kent bitterly shook his head. “Now, I missed that. I never knew about him and her until that night. I thought the baby was mine. The timing was right. She told me I was the only one she’d been with. Lying whore. Even when she broke up with me a few weeks before the baby was due, even when she said then that the baby wasn’t mine, I didn’t believe her. All I wanted was to marry her and stop sneaking around and live like normal people, her and me and our baby. Just be a real family.”

“She had another baby,” Robbie pointed out, gesturing toward Anamaria. “What about her?”

Kent’s gaze flickered over her derisively. “She had family to take her in. She didn’t need to be with us.”

It sounded callous—it
was
callous. But given Glory’s history, who could blame Kent for thinking she would agree? She’d given away custody of her first two daughters; why not the third?

“But Glory turned you down,” Robbie prompted.

“No, she didn’t,” Kent hastily responded. “She said she needed some time. Said she needed to get herself together for the baby’s birth, and then we’d talk.

“I kept waiting for her to call, but she never did. Every day, every night. Then that night I was on my way over to Aunt Lydia’s and I saw her leaving. It was raining real hard, and that car of hers was always giving her trouble, so I decided to follow her home, just to make sure she got there. Only she didn’t go home.”

The downpour would have made it cold and miserable, Anamaria thought, and would have turned the road to the cabin into soupy mud. In her mind, she could see Glory in her little secondhand car—
It may be a junker, but God love her, she’s
my
junker
—trying to navigate the road. Cyrus waited at this end in his fancy fishing cabin, with more money than he knew what to do with and a baby or grandbaby about to make an appearance in the world. She could have turned around at any point and gone home, but she’d forged ahead for Charlotte’s sake, for her family’s sake.

“When she saw my headlights behind her, she thought I was my father,” Kent said, his voice flat and distant. “She pulled over, hoping to avoid the rest of the drive up here. She about jumped out of her skin when she saw it was me at her window. She told me to go home, told me I was going to ruin everything. I didn’t know what she was talking about. God, I was a damn fool.

“That was when she told me, standing in the rain down there on the road, freezing our asses off. She’d been sleeping with my father longer than she’d known me. This kid that I
was willing to marry her for, to give up everything for, was his snot-nosed bastard. My own freakin’ half sister.”

Anamaria walked to the top of the steps, facing out, the scene playing out in her mind as his words continued. He’d howled like a wounded animal when Glory had told him Cyrus was Charlotte’s father, and he’d slapped her, knocking her to the ground. Immediately apologetic, he’d offered his hand, but instead she’d kicked out at him, hitting him squarely in the testicles. As he’d sunk to the ground with another howl of pain, she’d pushed to her feet and started running. Her shawl was all she had to keep her dry, and it wasn’t made for that. It slipped and tree branches snagged at it, but she clenched the ends tightly in her hands and ran on, heart pounding, abdomen cramping, angling through the woods for the river.

Kent had lain there in the mud, sniveling, trying twice to get to his feet before managing to do so. Soaked to the skin, in pain, sucking air in small gasps, he’d taken a few halting steps after her. Every movement throbbed, fueling his disillusionment and betrayal, until rage overcame pain. He’d caught her on the path, roaring her name. She’d looked over her shoulder, crying loudly enough for him to hear over the rain, and then she’d turned back and fallen.

“You didn’t go for help,” Robbie said quietly, his voice jarring Anamaria from the scene. Hugging herself tightly, she turned to look at them: Kent, once a twenty-year-old boy, in love and determined to be a better father than his father could have ever been…only to find out that Cyrus had been Glory’s lover first. Had fathered the child Kent believed was his own.

And Robbie…somber, strong, capable, concerned for her.
I’m the shallow one, the superficial one, the irresponsible one,
he’d said, but it was so much bull. Maybe when he was a boy,
but boys were allowed those faults. He was a man to be proud of. A man who would do what was right.

Kent’s voice was barely audible. “She was hurt bad. Her head was all gashed open, and she was having trouble breathing and seeing things that weren’t there. I couldn’t have carried her back, and if I’d left to get someone, it would have been too late. The baby was already coming, and Glory was already going.”

She wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there. It was Grandma Chessie, Moon, Florence and plenty of the others who’d gone on before. They’d been waiting to welcome her. Birthing was the hard part, coming into the world all alone. Passing to meet again with people you loved, who loved you back, was sweet and easy.

Tears moistened Anamaria’s cheeks as she spoke for the first time. “You were there when our sister was born.”

Kent stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, then swallowed hard, making the connection. His father, her mother. “She came sliding out into the water. I wrapped her in Glory’s shawl. I was going to leave her there, but…”

It was likely true that he couldn’t help Glory, but the baby was another matter. If he took her, she would live; if he left her, she would die. Anamaria couldn’t help but think Cyrus would have made a different decision.

“Where did you take her?”

“Someplace safe.”

“Where?” Robbie asked.

But Kent’s eyes darkened, his jaw clamped shut and he folded his arms over his chest for emphasis.

A long moment passed, birds singing, sun shining, a boat putting by on the river. A perfectly normal day. And all Anamaria wanted to do was grieve in Robbie’s arms.

Robbie finally broke the silence. He moved closer to Kent,
laying his hand on his shoulder, the way Rick had done with him a short time earlier. “Will you go into town with us and talk to Tommy?”

Kent turned away, staring out over the woods through which Glory had fled to her death, and his sigh seemed to well up from the depths of his soul. “Why not? What’s left to lose? Let me lock up the cabin.”

The screen door bumped shut behind him. Robbie joined Anamaria at the steps, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “You were right. Charlotte survived.”

She smiled thinly. “Yeah. I wonder how many tens of thousands of mixed-race twenty-three-year-old girls I’ll have to go through to find her. Because, you know, Mama Odette won’t be able to die in peace without seeing her grandbaby.”