Ten minutes later she decided that he’d probably never tried to get Waneath into his bed. He was the kind of man whose ego wouldn’t allow him to bed a woman more beautiful than he was.
Discouraged, she drove back to the motel and found a note from David asking her to dinner. At his house.
She was supposed to meet Arnold in Jackson, but he wouldn’t mind if she reneged on that promise. They were both used to last-minute changes of plan.
They’d been friends for a long time. When she’d first come to work for Alec, she’d wondered whether Arnold might be gay.
He never seemed to have a serious girlfriend, but at bar functions he always had a different girl on his arm—beautiful, charming and forgettable.
One long night in Chicago he’d confided in her. She’d come down with a twenty-four-hour bug and had begged him to take over cross-examination of a minor witness in a wrongful-death suit the following morning.
He’d gone into her bathroom and thrown up.
Alec had known, of course, but Alec was a genius at keeping confidences.
Before he came south, Arnold had been an up-and-coming litigator, building a career in New York, and building a life with his young bride, Shirley, in an apartment on Long Island. Life was good.
They’d only been married a couple of years when she burst an unsuspected ectopic pregnancy and wound up in the emergency room.
At the time, Arnold was summing up before a tough judge. By the time he arrived at the hospital, Shirley had bled to death on the table.
Nobody blamed him. He endured the sympathetic stares and pats, and went every Friday evening to dinner with his in-laws, who shoved Shirley’s younger sister at him, until he couldn’t take it anymore. One day he called Alec Mulholland and asked for a job in Atlanta. One where he would never have to stand up and speak in a courtroom again.
Kate knew that in some way he loved her, just as she loved him. When Alec had died so suddenly, Arnold was the first person she called. He had stayed until after the funeral. He had handled probate of Alec’s will, set up the details of the transfer of power in the firm. She trusted him implicitly and worked with him every chance she got.
The perfect team.
But they never spoke of his marriage again. Not quite a secret, but still an unacknowledged elephant in the corner of the room.
An unpleasant thought crossed her mind. Alec had concealed the seriousness of his heart trouble from her. David had taken refuge in Melba’s arms to avoid dumping his angst in her lap. Her mother had tried to conceal her father’s infidelities.
She must give off serious “I don’t want to know” vibes. Was she really that weak a reed?
Her stomach growled. Enough introspection. She went to see what she could dredge up from the vending machine in the motel office to serve as lunch.
She ate a couple of packets of peanut-butter crackers and two bags of potato chips. She knew she ought to be out doing something, but for the life of her, at that point she was so tired and so dispirited she couldn’t think what. She sank onto her bed and turned on the television in time to catch the noon news. Halfway through, she looked up at a commercial.
“Hey, folks, Big Bill Talley here, telling y’all to come on down to Talley Motors and let ole Big Bill make you a deal on that new car or truck better’n anything south of the Mason-Dixon line!”
Big Bill Talley deserved his name. Hard to tell on television, of course, but he looked about the size of an eighteen-wheeler with an extra-wide load. He had massive amounts of wavy brown hair that Kate would have bet was the result of a toupee, and his fancy blue-and-white cowboy shirt stretched across his barrel chest and around biceps as thick as her thighs.
And cheerful! Militantly, terrifyingly cheerful. Judging from his short-sleeved shirt and the leaves on the trees behind him, the commercial had been filmed months ago, long before Waneath’s death. But there was still something scary about that broad grin. Like an alligator waiting in the shallow water of a lagoon for an unsuspecting crane to meander by.
Easy to tell where Waneath got her teeth and her height. But her enormous eyes came from her mother. Big Bill’s were small, narrow, piggy, and set a couple of millimeters too close to the bridge of his nose. Despite his happy demeanor, Kate could well understand Jimmy Viccolla’s discomfort. This was not a man to cross.
She felt a frisson of fear. Amazing that Talley had not so far attempted to burn down Long Pond with Jason inside. Or come after Kate herself. He looked like a man who would feel his family, particularly the female members of his family, were his possessions. And resent bitterly anyone who deprived him of one of them.
Nonsense. That sort of thing only happened in bad Hollywood B-movies.
Still, the fact that he had not attended Jason’s bail hearing, nor put up more than token resistance to the second autopsy of Waneath’s body was worrisome. Kate’s grandmother had once warned her that copperheads were more dangerous than rattlers, because at least rattlers gave advance notice that they were angry.
She jumped when the telephone rang, and only then realized she’d been dozing. She brightened when she heard Arnold’s voice on the line.
“Kate? Autopsy report there yet?”
“Not unless they’re holding it in the office. I haven’t checked.”
“Nuts. Look, can we cancel dinner tonight?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I intend to work straight through on the change-of-venue thing. They’ve got a great library here, and I’m coming up with some dandy case law. I feel certain that we can convince a judge that Jason can’t get a fair trial in Athena County.”
“Great.”
“And what have you been up to?”
“I saw two of Waneath’s professors. I don’t think either of them qualifies as daddy of the month, although I must admit Vasquez could out-handsome Antonio Banderas.”
“My, my. Hormones acting up, are they?”
“My hormones are my business, thank you.”
“See that you keep them to yourself. Speaking of hormones, what’s the latest on Canfield?”
“Give it a rest, Arnold. I don’t look back, remember. What’s done is done. I don’t give second chances.”
“Well, see that you don’t. You have better things to do with your life than spend it canning peaches and walking behind a plow.”
Kate laughed. “I suspect the plow David uses is air-conditioned and cost a quarter of a million dollars. Besides, might be kind of fun. I’ve always wanted to learn to drive a tractor.”
“Bite your tongue!” He hesitated. “Seriously, Kate, watch yourself with Canfield.”
“Why do you dislike him so much?”
“I like him all right personally. But it’s been less than a year since Alec’s death, and whether you realize it or not, you are vulnerable. You’re the sort of woman who needs a man around.”
Kate gaped at the phone. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, you are.”
“Am not.”
“Are too. Whether you recognize it or not, you’re a very social animal and a born nurturer. I’ve seen you with your clients, remember. Born nurturers tend to go for the sort of man that doesn’t want to be nurtured. Mother Nature is a real bitch sometimes.”
“So you don’t think he needs nurturing?”
He laughed, and the bitterness was still there. “Oh, he needs it all right. Just doesn’t want it. I, on the other hand...”
Kate waited.
“Forget it. I may be late getting back from Jackson. I’ll see you in the morning after I’ve dragged my eyes open.”
Kate nodded at the phone as though he could see her. “Arnold? Be careful, please. I’ve just gotten a glimpse of Big Bill Talley, Waneath’s daddy, on the boob tube. He is immense. I hope he’s a gentle giant, but don’t bet on it. Be really careful.”
“That goes double for you, Kate. I’m in Jackson. You’re there. Watch yourself. Stick close to the motel.”
“Will do.”
She sat looking at the phone for at least a minute after she hung up. There was now no reason why she shouldn’t meet David for dinner. No reason except her own nerves. And a feeling of raw longing so intense that she found it frightening.
So, she should face her fears. She took a deep breath, called David’s number, waited for five rings and then heard his answering machine pick up. Of course, he’d be at Long Pond or out in the fields or anyplace except in his house waiting to hear from her. She left a message telling him that she was free for dinner and would drive out to his place about seven. Then she called the motel office and found that no envelope had arrived from Memphis. So no autopsy. Bother. DNA might take as long as four months, but blood-typing on the fetus should be a piece of cake.
She let her head fall back against the thin pillows and allowed her mind to drift. She told herself she needed to go over the case start to finish, but David’s face kept intruding. Not the face she remembered from their years together, the face that she had told herself she hated. She couldn’t seem to dredge that face up in her mind any longer. She saw him instead only the way he was now, with lines at the corners of his eyes and grooves starting at the corners of his mouth. And sadness buried so deep behind those blue eyes that they were like a chill mountain tarn.
How much of that sadness was her doing? She could no longer avoid her part of the responsibility for the breakup of their marriage.
She had never thought about what might have happened if she and David had confronted his infidelity and Melba’s pregnancy together. And then had confronted his lack of confidence in his acting ability together as well.
Her mind shied away. She didn’t want to think about any of that. Nothing could change the past.
But what did the future hold?
Someone knocked tentatively at her door. She started, opened her eyes and called, “Yes?”
Again that tentative knock. She rolled off the bed and went to the door. “Who’s there?” No answer. She put her eye to the view hole and saw the top of a head of brown hair. Female.
She opened the door. The girl who stood outside jumped back as though she’d been threatened. Her eyes were wide and terrified behind her glasses. Kate looked at her mottled skin and the splatter of pimples across her forehead, at the lank hair and wide-legged jeans that hung from a tubby figure, and made a guess. “Coral Anne?”
The girl ducked away.
“Come in,” Kate said, and stood aside.
Coral Anne scuttled in and motioned for Kate to shut the door behind her.
Kate smiled what she hoped was a welcoming smile. She held out her hand. “I don’t think we’ve met officially. I’m Kate Mulholland.”
“I know who you are,” Coral Anne said, ignoring Kate’s hand.
“Please, have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Got any bourbon?”
Kate blinked. “I meant a soft drink.”
“Forget it.” Coral Anne looked around the room. “This place sucks.”
“You could say that.” Kate sat on the bed and pulled her stocking feet up in front of her. After a moment Coral Anne perched on the edge of the desk chair.
“My momma finds out I’m here she’ll kill me,” Coral Anne said.
Kate nodded. She didn’t doubt it for a minute.
“She told me she smacked you across the face?” The sentence had a question mark at the end of it, so Kate answered it.
“She did. Good and hard.”
Coral Anne snickered. “Lord, I would love to have seen that. My momma goes at it with both hands when she gets mad.”
For “it” Kate read “me.” “She go at you?”
“Me’n Waneath both.” Then the girl added proudly, “My daddy never lays a hand on either one of us. He’s a big ole pussycat, big as he is. But my momma, now, she has a temper.”
Kate waited, then said, “So why did you come?”
“To tell you it’s not Jason’s baby.”
Kate sat up. “You knew about the baby?”
Coral Anne nodded. “I’m the only one she told. We took one of those home-pregnancy things and I had to drive all the way out to the Dumpster by the levee to throw it away so Momma wouldn’t find it in the trash.”
“You have a car?”
“Sure. Got it for my sixteenth birthday. My daddy sells cars. Me and Waneath didn’t even have to share one.” She smiled. “Mine’s newer.” She sighed. “I guess Daddy’ll sell Waneath’s car. He had one of the guys drive it to his house and put it in his garage. Daddy cried. Said he couldn’t bear to look at it.”
“I’m sorry. I know how hard that kind of thing can be for a parent.”
“Do you? Really?” The eyes Coral Anne turned to Kate were intelligent behind their thick glasses. “If this was some kind of story, Waneath and me’d hate each other. I mean, she was beautiful, and me...” She looked down at her dumpy body. “But we didn’t hate each other more’n any pair of sisters. Mostly, we loved each other. My momma and daddy do
not
appreciate me,” she said candidly. “But Waneath did.” She laughed. “Shoot, she should. I did her damn homework.”