Read Sand Castles Online

Authors: Antoinette Stockenberg

Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary

Sand Castles (25 page)

"No more excuses; it's back to the beach house for me, I guess," she said, picking up her shoulder bag with obvious reluctance. She gave him a sad smile that he wanted to believe was filled with regret at the thought of leaving him, not of joining them.

Now. Tell her now
.

She lingered at the door as if held there by the brute force of his desire to keep her. "Hopefully," she said, "they've all had the chance to talk out yesterday's fiasco, but I'm not betting on it; it was such a juicy event. Well
... you'll lock up, I guess?" she asked with an oddly wistful look. She reminded Zack of a kid after the recess bell's been rung.

She had her hand on the doorknob.

"Wendy,
wait
—don't go."

"Why?" she asked, responding to the urgency in his voice.

"There's something you should know."

"About?"

"Me."

"Okay," she said with a puzzled look. She dropped her bag on the floor at her feet and plopped down on the nearest chair. "Shoot."

Chapter
18

 

There she sat, with her hands clasped between her tanned knees, waiting patiently and trustingly for Zack to stab her through the heart.

He said, "Do you know Zina's maiden name?"

She looked surprised by the question. She shook her head. "Why would I?"

"It's Tompkins," he said. "Do you know my last name?"

"Actually, I don't," she admitted, embarrassed. "I've been wanting to ask."

"It's—"

"Oh, no," she said with a sudden little inhale. "Oh, please don't tell me it's Tompkins."

Now it was his turn to feel the heat. " 'Fraid so."

"You're her—what would that make you? Not her husband," she said, totally at a loss. "Her—what's left? You
must
be her husband."

"I'm her brother."

"Her brother. You're her brother," Wendy repeated, as if she were trying to knock some sense into herself. "But
... you don't look anything like her," she argued, going off on a tack that surprised him. "She's thin
... pale... blond. She could be Norwegian. Whe
reas you—you're big; dark-
haired. Dark skinned. You barely look from the same race, much less the same family. You
can't
be her brother."

Obviously she wasn't aware of their mother's history. "Be that as it may," he said quietly, "I am."

"Then why are you here?" she asked in a daze. "I don't understand."

"Wendy
... you do."

She shook her head almost angrily. "I do not. A woman—you say she's your sister—shows up at my party and is shocked when Jim doesn't know who she is. You show up at the house and begin sawing and hammering—and obviously Jim doesn't know who
you
are, either. Why is that?"

"Coincidence?"

She may have been dazed, but she wasn't amused. He watched her stiffen visibly at his halfhearted quip.

"I asked you a simple question," she said.

There was an element in her voice that he hadn't heard before; it called up an image of men in hardhats welding steel girders. Zack dropped any pretense of playing it light and said flatly, "He knows us. He's lying."

"The hell he is!" she cried, jumping up.

"He's lying, Wendy," Zack repeated.

Her face was flushed; her chest was rising and falling in a stricken rhythm that made Zack want to turn away. The compulsion to tell her everything was overpowering; but even he didn't know what the exact reason behind it was.

She said in a voice cold with suspicion, "And the name
Hayward
?"

"Is Jim's real name. I don't know where he picked up the Hodene. Stole it, I assume."

"So you're saying he's—"

"A bigamist. I'm sure my sister must have mentioned," Zack said miserably.

"You don't
know
?”

"She's not speaking to me."

"And why is that? Why is that, you—!
Damn
you!"

Outraged and appalled, she lunged at him; Zack was so rigid with tension that he scarcely budged. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her arms down and away from him with something like horror; her shove was so unlike the fantasy he'd created of their first contact.

"Listen to me,
listen,"
he said, holding her fast. "The genie's out of the bottle now. Zina knows about Jim; your family knows about Zina. It's just a matter of time before everyone sorts it all out and arrives at the truth. Do you want to be the last to know?"

She whipped her wrists out of his grip so hard that she managed to free herself; Zack was amazed by her strength.

"There's nothing to know! Nothing!" she cried.

She rubbed her reddened wrist and Zack took note of it.
I've hurt her every way I can, now.
He despised himself, and yet he plowed on. He said wearily, "When you lay awake last night, you never asked yourself, 'What if?'"

"Not
once."

"I don't believe it. I saw you this morning: you didn't know who was telling the truth."

"But now I do—and it's neither you nor your con-artist sister. If she is your sister! She's your wife, isn't she? Or your lover.
Isn't
she
.
It's obvious! It explains why there's no resemblance. You're one of those teams people read about. You go around the country, scamming innocent families—breaking their hearts, destroying their lives. And for what? What are you after? It's money, isn't it? Dirty, filthy money!"

"What else?" he said in a bitter retort. "My sister doesn't have any."

"Lots of people don't have any! They still don't go around trying to pick it out of other people's pockets. You're both crooks. You're liars and crooks!" she said, backing away from him.

"See, now that's more what you should be saying about
Jim," said Zack, dangerously calm now. "And, okay, about me. But not about my sister. She's as innocent as rain. She loved Jim madly and, I'm willing to bet, still does.
Even after yesterday. Even though he abandoned her when she was young and vulnerable and pregnant—"

"Pregnant?" Wendy's look turned totally blank. She dropped back down in the chair. "How
... do you mean, pregnant?"

"I mean, as
with child," Zack said dryly. "But the baby didn't live, and it's not hard to see why. Zina was a basket case of grief and worry. I guess she didn't say," he added sardonically. "It's hard to go into all the boring details while you're being run off the beach on a rail."

"She fled; no one chased her," Wendy said dully. She leaned her forehead on the upturned palms of her hands and sighed, deep in her own reflections, the picture of abject misery.

I've done this,
Zack thought.
This is what I've done.
He was incapable of getting any more analytical than that.

"You're lying," she said at last, sounding almost sullen about it. "I know you are. You two don't look anything alike. I don't believe you. I believe Jim."

Still.

"Have you considered that my mother might have fooled around?" Zack threw out recklessly. Certainly that was his theory about the difference.

Wendy lifted her head from her hands and stared at him with revulsion. "You're disgusting, you know that? Is nothing off limits to you?" She bowed her head again.

You. You
're off limits. So much more now than when you thought you were married.

The brutal realization roared through Zack like a freight train, leaving a vast hole where his heart used to be.

"I didn't want this, Wendy," he said in a low, broken
voice. "You can't possibly know how much I didn't want this."

She looked up; she seemed surprised to see that he was still there.

"What's his favorite color?" she suddenly asked.

"His—I don't know. How would I know?" Zack said, offended that she was trying to test him.

"How does he take his pizza?"

"
Oh, for

.
With pepperoni and mushrooms!"

She made a dismissive sound. "Everyone takes it like that," she snapped. "It doesn't prove a thing. He has a scar. Where is it?"

"I don't know," Zack said peevishly. "You tell me."

"On the inside of his thigh."

"I'm not familiar with the inside of his thigh!"

"You don't know him from Adam!"

Zack threw up his hands. "Why would I lie? What could I possibly gain?"

"I've told you: dirty, filthy money."

"For her."

"
You say.”

"For
her,
damn it! My sister's entitled to a hell of a lot more than I asked for."

Up she jumped again. "I knew it!" she cried, waving a triumphant finger at him. "You're nothing but an ordinary blackmailer!"

"Oh, lady—there's nothing ordinary about this," Zack said, scowling now. He turned the tables on her. "Suppose I ask myself some questions. What's his favorite movie?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
What's his favorite rock group? The Rolling Stones. What's his favorite Stones song? 'Satisfaction.' Where was he born?
Piedmont
,
Massachusetts
. What's his biggest phobia? Being locked in a room without lights. What's his favorite cut of beef? Filet mignon."

"You knew about the steak from the
party
yesterday!" she said, seizing on the slimmest of straws and hanging by it. "Liar!"

It was her blind resolve to believe the real liar that made Zack slap his hand on his wallet pocket and say, "Yeah? Well, this wasn't taken at the party yesterday."

He fished out his ace in the hole: a dog-eared photo of Jim with his arm around Zina, taken at Plimouth Plantation in
Massachusetts
. The edge of a Pilgrim could just be seen in the lower left.

"The date's on the photo," he said, holding it out to her. "It hasn't been digitalized, so don't go accusing me of it."

She folded her arms and said, "I'm not interested."

"Look at it, Wendy. Or are you afraid of what you'll see?" he taunted.

She hesitated and then said, "Fine. I'll look at it. And then get out of my house." Taking two steps forward, she gave the photo a cursory glance.

A low gasp escaped her, and Zack thought he had her convinced at last. But then she said, "So
that's
your game. Jim made the mistake of dating her once, and based on one crummy photograph, you think you're going to convince me that he went off and married her. And then didn't divorce her. And then married me. Based on one lousy, crummy, shitty photograph.
Please."

"It was taken on their honeymoon, believe it or not," Zack said evenly. "My sister has a thing for early American."

"Which my husband obviously doesn't.
We
went to
Bermuda
."

God, she was determined not to believe the worst. Zack didn't know whether to admire her or pity her.

She gave him a fierce look that suddenly glazed over with tears. "Why did you have to come here, Zack?" she asked.
"Why?"

Devastated to know that he was the one breaking her apart, Zack said, "Zina saw the AP photo in our paper. She said it was Jim; I said it wasn't. She'd had false sightings before, over the years. Frankly, I thought that this was one of them. But rather than let her run around on a fool's errand, I offered to run around for her." He added wryly, "It takes a really proficient fool to do that, you know."

Holding back her tears somehow, Wendy waited for him to continue.

"After I saw for myself that Jim Hodene was her Jimmy Hayward, I found I had two choices," Zack explained. "I could have told my sister the truth and destroyed her, or I could have tried to, well, make the situation work to her advantage."

"The money." The glaze of her tears dried up, and her voice got harder, a steel chisel that she began methodically to pound through his heart. "You had a third choice," she said. "You could have walked away from here and lied to her. Period."

"A lie is still a
li
e."

"Obviously you never went to Catholic school."

"All I wanted—all I still want—for her is a little security. Why shouldn't she have it? God knows she's suffered enough because of him."

Wendy answered his question with one of her own. "You didn't think that you were playing a dangerous game?"

"I did."

"You didn't think that lives might be destroyed in the process?"

"I did."

"And still you took the chance."

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