“Sugar, in Stokesville everybody’s back door is always unlocked. Which is probably what the intruder was counting on. Anyway, when nobody came to the door, Clegg let himself in. And found your father on the living room floor.”
“It couldn’t have been . . . I don’t know.” Her hands rose and fell in her lap. “A stroke? A fall?”
“Not unless he fell and hit the back of his head with a bedroom lamp.”
The words lay between them, heavy and stiff as a corpse.
Bailey exhaled. “Okay, not a fall. So, what happened?”
“Our best guess is your father came home and surprised the intruder upstairs.”
“What was he doing upstairs?”
“Probably looking for cash. Jewelry. Anything small he could turn into a quick fix. Your mother will have to go through the house, see what’s missing.”
She shook her head. “This is Stokesville, not D.C. We don’t do junkie burglaries.”
“The whole county has a growing meth problem. And you’ve got gangs moving in from Raleigh and Durham. Of course, it’s possible your father spooked the guy and he ran off without taking anything.”
“Did Dad see him? Could he identify him?”
“The chief tried to get a description when your father came to. But he doesn’t remember anything. He was watching TV on the couch when he was struck from behind. He probably didn’t see anything.”
“Not if ESPN was on,” Bailey said ruefully. “What about the neighbor? What did she see?”
“Not much from the back. White male, medium build, wearing jeans and a ball cap.”
“That narrows it down to, what? Half the population of Orange County?”
“Maybe a third.” Frustration stuck in his throat. “We’ll do our best.”
Bailey took his hand and squeezed. As if this time his best would be good enough. “I know you will.”
Surprise held him speechless. She had pretty hands, long fingered, with neat, unpolished nails. He’d indulged a few private, inappropriate thoughts about those hands on his body.
But Bailey had never before initiated any physical contact between them, never touched him the way a woman does when she wants a man’s attention, never patted his arm or brushed his shoulder or touched her fingertips to his chest to make a point.
It felt . . . nice.
He tightened his hand on hers.
A baby wailed. A nurse called the limping teenager back to an exam bay. Patients walked or were wheeled through the sliding doors. An hour passed, bringing another nurse. A different baby.
“You must be used to this,” Bailey said.
“This?” he said cautiously.
She flapped her free hand at the shifting population of the chairs. “This. The waiting. It sucks.”
She’d been up almost all night. She must be exhausted. “You want something? Water? A magazine?”
“No, thank you. Was she sick a long time?”
I want answers,
she’d said.
I’ll give you what you want if you give me what I want.
“Who?” he asked.
“Your wife. You said she had cancer.”
He didn’t talk about it.
“You want a story, I’ll buy you that magazine. Hell of a lot more entertaining.”
Her gaze was warm and level. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You probably spent a lot of time in hospitals.”
She was harder to fool than the grief counselor. Or maybe just harder to shake.
“Not really. By the time we knew Teresa was sick, it was already too late.”
“You didn’t have any . . . warning?” Her quiet voice pulled at him, plucking at memories like loose threads in a tapestry.
“She’d gained a little weight. Lost her appetite. We thought . . . I hoped she might be pregnant. But she kept saying no. So after the second home pregnancy test turned up negative, I finally talked her into seeing a doctor.”
Bailey squeezed his hand. “And?”
“She had stage-four epithelial ovarian cancer.” He could say it. He could say the words. “She had the first surgery, for the diagnosis. But after that . . . There are treatments. Chemo. Radiation. More surgeries, to debulk the tumors and clear the blockage of the intestine. But she wouldn’t . . . She didn’t want . . .”
He stared very hard at the clock on the opposite wall until the numbers blurred.
“I’m sorry,” Bailey said again, softly. “I didn’t know.”
“Palliative treatment, they call it. Drain the fluids, to relieve the pressure. Pills, for the pain. We fought about it all the time. I didn’t want her to suffer. I just . . . Christ, I wanted her to live.”
“Of course you did.”
“At the end, she couldn’t make decisions herself anymore. I took her to the hospital. Hell, I dragged her to the hospital. Only by then . . .” He drew a harsh breath. “She couldn’t eat. The doctors—they wanted to feed her through a tube. She could live a little longer that way, they said.”
“Is that what she wanted?”
“No.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “No.”
“What did you do?”
He dropped his hands. “I told them no.” He stared again at the opposite wall, not seeing it, not seeing anything but his wife, begging him with her eyes. “I let her die.”
He wasn’t asking for pity. He had no right to her sympathy or her understanding. But maybe that wouldn’t matter to her.
She blinked those big brown eyes at him. Intelligent eyes. Compassionate eyes.
“That’s crap,” she said.
His jaw slackened. He clenched it tight. He should never have opened his mouth. “Forget it.”
But Bailey wasn’t finished with him. “You’re not responsible for your wife’s illness. Or her treatment plan. Or her death.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe then you could deal with this misplaced sense of guilt instead of brooding about it.”
Something like panic kindled inside him. He blew it into rage. Anger was cleaner, easier to handle.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
She touched him again, her fingers light on his bare arm, stirring him in ways he thought he was done with. He wanted her touch.
And he didn’t, because he was sitting here talking about his wife the way he never talked about her to anybody, missing his wife, cheating on his wife by lusting after Bailey.
“So explain it to me,” she said.
“You wouldn’t understand. I let Teresa down. I let Gabby down.”
“You did your best.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
He had always been able to protect them. The big, tough cop. The competent male.
My hero,
Teresa used to tease, watching him slide off his shoulder holster before joining her in bed.
But he hadn’t protected her, he hadn’t been there for her, when it mattered most. He lost her.
And he’d lost himself.
“Miss Wells?” A tall young man in nurse’s scrubs with a single diamond stud in his ear claimed her attention. “You can come back now. Only one of you,” he added when Steve stood with her.
Steve was in no mood to argue. He flashed his badge instead.
The nurse looked unimpressed. “Right. Another one. Well, come on. Maybe you can talk your boss into getting out of my worklane.”
Bailey clasped her hands in front of her. “Has the doctor seen my father yet?”
The young man smiled. “Seen your father and talked to your mama. They’re both going to be just fine.”
“When can he go home?”
“Doctor wants to keep him for observation overnight.” The nurse pushed open the swinging doors, moving like a sprinter in his white athletic shoes. “But his films look good.”
Fighting off temper, Steve followed them. He was here to provide escort and support, he reminded himself. But he was still stirred up inside. His feelings churned like water released from ice, threatening the detachment he had hidden behind so long.
In the lane on the other side, Walt Clegg made his way down the row of curtained beds like a politician working a Fourth of July picnic.
Steve stopped.
Shit.
The last thing he needed now was to go another round with his boss.
“You all take care,” Walt said to a patient. “This heat’s killer . . . Margaret, how’s that grandbaby of yours?”
He saw Steve with Bailey, and his expression hardened.
“Miz Wells.” He nodded. “Sorry about your daddy.”
“Thank you. Is he—”
“This way,” the nurse said.
Walt’s gaze cut to Steve. “Stick around a minute.”
“Later.”
“You go ahead,” Bailey said. “I’ll be fine.”
Steve didn’t want to leave her. But she wasn’t asking for his support, was she? On the contrary.
He let her go.
“Pretty girl,” Walt observed as she followed the tall black nurse down the curtained row. “But damned if she don’t remind me of that L’il Abner character. You know the one? Little guy in black with the bad luck cloud following him around.”
“Before my time,” Steve said tersely.
Walt shook his head. “Seven years I’ve been chief, and only one homicide. She comes back to town, and within three weeks I’ve got two dead bodies and a felony assault on my hands.”
Unease slid through the temper. “That’s not her fault.”
“Maybe not,” Walt said. “In fact, she did us a favor last night.”
Steve balanced on the balls of his feet, waiting for the punch.
“Just got off the phone with SBI. Their lab boys found traces of the deceased’s blood in the crack of the base. I’d say we have ourselves a murder weapon.”
Steve didn’t think Walt had pulled him aside to tell him he was right all along.
He struggled to get his head back in the job.
“Prints?” he asked.
“Wiped.”
He expected that. Paul Ellis was too smart to plant the weapon on Bailey without carefully wiping his prints first.
“So we still can’t prove Paul Ellis killed his wife,” Steve said.
Or that Bailey didn’t
.
Walt rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand. “Well, now, I talked to Jim in the DA’s office. We know Ellis had the opportunity. He had the financial motive, and now we’ve got the means.”
“But it’s all circumstantial.”
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t have liked to get Ellis’s confession. But him killing himself like that . . . it’s damn near the same thing. If Miz Wells will cooperate, we can make this whole thing go away. I’m asking Jim in the DA’s office to rule the deaths a murder/suicide.”
Which would leave Bailey cleared, both cases closed, and everybody happy.
Except Steve.
And Bailey, who was too damn honest for her own good.
He should let it go. He had come home to Stokesville to make a better life for his daughter. He wasn’t here to make news, to make waves, or to make enemies. But something about this whole setup nagged at him like an open window in a ground floor apartment.