Lemon Tart (26 page)

“I tried to stay away,” he said, “to pretend it hadn’t
happened, but the next time I went to Boston I called her. And the next, and
the next. I made it clear to Anne that our relationship was over, but I wanted
to see Trevor. I was able to see him every few months, watch him grow. Finally,
when Trevor was fourteen months old I realized he was getting old enough to
remember me between visits. My staying in his life would make things harder for
everyone. It broke my heart to do what I had to do, Sadie, it was awful, but I
paid Anne more money based on her promise to leave me alone. Dad died a few
weeks later and I told Carrie I only got half the inheritance he really left
for me, the other half went to Anne to pretend I had never been a part of her
life. That Trevor was not my child.”

Jack let out a breath and wouldn’t meet Sadie’s eyes. She had
the feeling that he didn’t want to talk anymore. She wasn’t about to let that
happen. “You’re lucky I never talked to Carrie about the inheritance,” Sadie
said. As executor of their dad’s will, Sadie knew Jack had received almost
eighty thousand dollars—same as she did. “I could have clued
her in without knowing it.”

Jack nodded and gave her a repentant look. “I’d managed your
investments long enough to know you weren’t one to talk about money.”

Well, that was true. She’d always felt that finances were a
personal matter, which was why so few people knew that she was so well off.
“But Anne came to Garrison anyway,” Sadie said, getting back to the topic at
hand. “Why did she do that?” But Sadie had read the book. She knew exactly why
Anne had come to Garrison.

Jack shrugged and wiped at his eyes again. “I hadn’t spoken
with her for months, not since sending her the money. Then
I came home from work one day and Carrie starts telling me about this woman who
had just rented the Tilly house. That night I take the garbage to the curb, and
who should meet me with Trevor in her arms? She said that Trevor needed a
father and if I refused to go to her, she’d come to me.” He paused.
“I begged her to leave, I offered her more money. She didn’t want it.”

An instant picture entered Sadie’s mind. It was May, she was
helping Anne plant some tomatoes in the backyard. The ground was warming up and
Anne was excited about growing something all her own. The day was warm, with a
breeze that kept blowing their hair around their faces. Trevor was kicking a
ball—sometimes directly at them—but mostly
against the back of the house, then running after it. Sadie had teased Anne
about using her fresh tomatoes to lure in a good man come fall, when the
harvest would be on. Anne had smiled to herself and tucked a strand of
highlighted hair behind her ear.

“I’m just waiting for Mr. Right, Sadie. He’ll come around.”

Mr. Right—Mr. Jack Wright to be exact. Anne was waiting for him—waiting for him to
come to her. In the meantime she was taking seriously her education on how to
care for a home and family the way Jack would want—with Sadie
as the teacher. It wasn’t the book, not exactly, but it was close enough.

Even now Sadie could see Anne’s face from that day, see the
smile Sadie had interpreted as longing and dreamy, rather than secretive and
contemplative. She had to shake her head to get rid of the vision, afraid that
her feelings of betrayal would overshadow the sense she needed to understand
what Jack was telling her.

“And then you left Carrie a few weeks after Anne moved in. Had
she found out?” Sadie asked, bringing herself back to the present.

“No,” Jack said, a little too fast. “She didn’t know until I
confessed everything last night. But back then, once Anne had moved in, I knew
it was only a matter of time. I’d run out of cards to play and fate was
catching up with me. So I left—I left both of them. I couldn’t
bear seeing Anne, seeing Trevor—seeing what I’d done. I hoped
that if I left, Anne would leave too.”

Sadie watched his face. He wasn’t looking her in the eye
anymore. Instead he had a distant look on his face while his eyes were blankly
fixed on the tabletop. “But then you changed your mind and came back to kill
Anne months later?” Sadie asked. Up to this point she believed him. Not that
the story wasn’t utterly fantastic, but the emotions that played across his
face weren’t feigned. He meant what he said. But there was no way he killed
Anne. He wouldn’t work so hard to take care of her and Trevor and then murder
her. It was ludicrous. “And what about Trevor? What did you do with him?”

Jack was silent for a long time. Sadie was patient. He skirted
the question. “Anne called some old coworkers in Boston and got a job at the
office here in Garrison. I saw her when she came in for her interview on
Friday. She actually came into my office and gave me a key to her place. She
said I’d be wanting to come see her soon and she was trying to make it easy for
me. She was invading my life—stalking me. I couldn’t take it
anymore.”

“And Trevor? Where is he?”

“He’s . . . safe.”

“He’s alive?”

Jack’s head snapped up. “Of course he’s alive.”

Sadie shrugged as if they weren’t discussing the life of a
two-year-old boy. “Well, you’d kill his mother, why not assume
you’d kill him too? Destroying the evidence, so to speak.”

“He’s my son,” Jack said in short, clipped words, looking
horrified. “I would never hurt him.”

“And killing his mother isn’t hurting him? Where is he?”

Jack looked back down at his hands. “The police will find him
soon,” he said.

The cryptic response took her by surprise. What did that mean?
“Tell me where he is and I’ll go get him.”

“No.” It was a solid no, a “there is no way in heck I’ll ever
tell you” kind of no.

“So let me get this straight,” Sadie said, wiggling forward in
her seat and putting her arms on the table, shortening the distance between
them. His story was beginning to unravel. “You won’t risk telling your wife
about your infidelity and illegitimate child, but you’ll kill the mother of
your only son?”

Jack wouldn’t meet her eye. “I finished the Monday classes at
the convention and came back to Garrison to talk to Anne. I had hoped she would
take more money and disappear. But she wouldn’t. She was as obstinate as ever
and so I . . . I killed her.”

“What about Ron? He was there that night.”

Panic crossed Jack’s face, but he quickly repaired it. “Ron
came with me, but then I told him to leave when she became so difficult. I did
this, Sadie.”

“You took two cars? Ron drove separately?”

“Ye-es,” Jack said.

“Why? If you’re both going to the same place for the same
reason, why take two cars?”

“It seemed better that way.”

He was such a liar! She didn’t even bring up the fact that both
Ron and Jack then returned to the conference without
a toddler.

“And why did you go back to her house last night?” She was
leaning forward, staring at him so as not to miss a single nuance of his face.
He startled, furrowing his eyebrows for half a second.

“Uh, I . . . didn’t.” He glanced at the mirrored wall
as he answered.

“You did,” Sadie said. “You went to the closet, fumbled through
some boxes and stole some pictures.”

“How do you—”

Sadie waved a hand as if parting smoke from the unseen fire she
imagined coming from Detective Cunningham’s ears on the other side of that
glass. “Why were you there?”

Jack looked at the table again and eventually let out a breath.
“I gave Anne a gift, in the beginning. It was silly, really.” He paused and
Sadie feared she’d see some kind of calm look of reminiscence on his face, but
instead his pain intensified. “The first time we . . . went out, we
went to a waffle house. The next time I went to Boston I bought her a waffle
iron. She loved it, and it made me feel like some kind of hero for spending
thirty bucks on a kitchen appliance. There was a recipe in the instructions and
we made Belgian waffles together a few times—funny, Carrie
never lets me cook. She didn’t want me to mess up her kitchen.” He let out a
strangled breath. “When I saw Anne a year or so later, after Trevor was born,
she brought the box for the waffle maker out of her bedroom. In it she’d
collected all the e-mails we’d sent back and forth, a card I sent her
with some flowers, and a few pictures I didn’t even know she’d taken. She’d
used the box as some kind of hope chest. Last night I . . . I knew I
was going to turn myself in and I didn’t want those things found, I didn’t want
to hurt Carrie with them. So I took them and threw them in the fireplace when I
got back home.” He met Sadie’s eyes. “But I still don’t understand how you know—”

Sadie cut him off again, remembering the fire in the hearth at
Jack and Carrie’s the evening before. “It’s hard for me to believe that such a
cold-blooded killer would be so worried about his wife’s feelings.”

“I’m also an adulterer and a liar,” Jack said softly. “I’m not
the man you thought I was, Sadie. I’m a monster.”

Sadie chilled at the word “monster” and knew that regardless of
whether or not he convinced her of it, he truly believed it about himself. “If
you really want me to believe this—that Jack Wright, my friend,
brother, and neighbor—the coach of my son’s little league team,
the man who mowed my lawn, fixed my appliances, stood up at my son’s eagle
court—if you really want me to believe you did this, then you
have to tell me what you did.”

Jack was silent and tears filled his red-rimmed eyes
again. Sadie ignored the tears on her own cheeks and didn’t break her gaze. She
needed to see him tell her
this—see him lie to her about it.

“I killed her,” Jack said, his voice a whisper.

“You strangled her,” Sadie said pointedly. “You didn’t just
kill her—you need to tell me that you strangled her.” She
paused and then spoke again, her words deliberately slow as she watched every
movement of his face. “You put your hands around her neck and killed the woman
you once loved, the mother of your only son.”

“Yes,” Jack said, his voice cracking. He couldn’t hold her eyes
any longer and looked at the table. “I put my hands around her neck and killed
the woman I once loved, the mother of my only son.” His voice choked and his
chin trembled as he said it. “I did this, Sadie. I did all of it.”

Chapter 27

“Did you
catch that?” Sadie said to Cunningham once the ugly gray door closed behind
her. What she wouldn’t give for a paint scraper and a
Sherwin-Williams clearance sale. The detective looked at her with a
guarded expression and nodded. Madsen wasn’t in the observation room with them,
which meant luck was on her side—sort of. There was still the
pesky matter of Jack taking the blame for something he didn’t do.

“He doesn’t know she was killed with a drapery tieback. He
didn’t do it,” Sadie said, fully assuming that their interest in the tieback
earlier meant that the coroner’s report had been rather specific. She looked
through the glass and watched her brother, head in his hands, slowly rocking
back and forth in his chair. Misery exuded from him and her throat got thick
again. Sadie was suddenly grateful that the tragedies in her life had not been
directly related to choices she made. How did someone live with the guilt of
having put events in motion that ended like this?

“Then who did?” Cunningham asked, the challenge in his voice
showing his frustration. “And why did he confess?”

“To protect Ron,” Sadie said. It was obvious. There had been a
momentary hope during her discussion with Jack that Ron wasn’t the man she felt
she’d discovered him to be—but that hope had gone now. Ron may
not have been Trevor’s father, and there was some relief there—though
if she’d had to choose, she’d have picked him over Jack to have fathered the
child—but regardless, she had little doubt that he was, in
fact, Anne’s murderer. He was there that night around the time the coroner’s
report said Anne had been killed. Jack felt guilty for having involved Ron and
felt this would be his penance.

“Your fiancé?” Cunningham asked, watching her closely.

“Just call him Ron,” Sadie said. She attempted a small smile,
though she couldn’t take the sadness from it. “The engagement is off.”

“Your brother would go to these lengths to protect him?”

Sadie furrowed her brow. It was obvious, and yet, ridiculous at
the same time. “You heard what he said,” she reminded him. “He said ‘I did
this.’ He feels like it’s his fault. He was the one who had the affair and
pulled Ron into it, and Anne died as a result so now he feels as if he’s
somehow responsible.”

“Would you do that?” Detective Cunningham asked. She looked up
to find him watching her, his eyes seeming to take in every detail of her face.
“Would you give up the rest of your life and plead guilty to a murder of
someone you cared for simply because you made a mistake?”

Sadie looked back at her brother. A guard was helping him to
stand. Jack shuffled out of the room, his back bent, and more than his
forty-six years showing in the slump of his shoulders. Even his hair
looked older, duller. “I don’t know,” Sadie said as the door closed without
Jack looking back. “I’ve managed to keep myself from having to make those kinds
of decisions.”