Authors: Mariah Stewart
They stood and listened to the harangue-fest for a few more minutes before Hal leapt from the dock to the deck of the Whaler and helped navigate the craft into position. Within minutes, the boat was tied up and both men were stepping up onto the dock. They chatted a few minutes—Hal introducing Maggie to Carter—before apparently forgetting all about the
Shady Lady
as the three headed directly to Walt’s.
“She’s up to no good.” Vanessa’s eyes narrowed. “Her last husband died recently so she’s on the loose. She’s come to St. Dennis and she’s realized that Hal is
pretty well off and she’s setting her sights on him again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, yes I do. I know that look.”
“Look, I’m sure after all these years, they have things to say to each other. They were in love once, they had a child together …”
“Which she never even bothered to tell him about until she couldn’t handle him. Let’s not forget about Beck and the way she told Hal that he had a son.”
When Grady didn’t comment, Vanessa stopped walking. “What?” she asked.
“I think you need to leave that part to them to work out.”
“How would you feel if Melissa—that was her name, right?” she asked, and when he nodded, she continued. He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “How would you feel if she disappeared from your life and came back years later with a child she said was yours?”
“She did disappear from my life,” he said softly, “and if she showed up today with a child of mine, I’d be very happy to have that child. I would have loved to have had a child. But since she’s dead, that’s not a possibility.”
“Oh, God, I am such an idiot. I am so sorry.” Vanessa’s face flushed as scarlet as the sun dropping into the Bay. “I can’t believe I said that.”
“It’s all right, Ness.…”
“What a boneheaded thing to say.” She was wide-eyed. “Boneheaded and thoughtless and insensitive and—”
“Enough.” He put a hand over her mouth. “I understand
the analogy you were trying to make. It’s all right. We can talk about Melissa, Ness. Just as we can talk about Gene.”
“That’s very different.” Her face grew very serious. “Gene and I got divorced because I knew that sooner or later, he was going to kill me. That’s why we’re not together. You and Melissa—you’d probably still be together if she hadn’t died, right?”
It was a question he hadn’t anticipated, and once asked, one he found himself hesitating a little too long to answer.
“I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You don’t have to say that just because you’re here with me. I can take honesty.”
“That’s an honest answer.” He sat on the edge of a stone bench that looked out over the water. “There were some things that … that didn’t set right with me.”
“Oh, hey, everyone has things about their significant other that drives them crazy.” She waved a hand as if to dismiss what she perceived must be inconsequential.
“This isn’t like, she always left her shoes in the middle of the floor, or that sort of thing. This was bigger. Much bigger.”
“You mean like maybe she was having an affair?”
“No, it was more like she lied to me about the half million dollars she’d hidden in the bookcase.”
The silence was overwhelming. For a moment, Vanessa could not speak. When she finally did, her words came almost as a squeak.
“A half a mil … half a mil …” She cleared her throat and tried again. “A half a million dollars in the bookcase?”
“Inside a bunch of those fake books, you know, the hollow ones? I found them when I started packing things to do some remodeling. The whole house needed repainting … you can probably imagine what the place looked like and smelled like. Before I could do any real work, I had to clean it out, so I started easy, packing up the small stuff.”
“What did you do next? After you realized what was in the fake books?”
“I sat on the floor and counted it. And I did exaggerate a little,” he confessed. “It was more like four hundred and seventy thousand.”
“Close enough to half a mil in my book,” she said. “Melissa never told you she had all this money?”
“After she moved, she told me that someone had paid her to quit the Bureau, but that she didn’t know
who it was, and while she said it was a lot of money, she never told me how much. I later found out that she hadn’t quite told the truth.”
Vanessa digested this for a moment. “Why would someone pay her to leave her job?”
“I suppose sooner or later, I need to tell you about Brendan.” His arm rested along the back of the bench, his fingers absently toying with the ends of her hair, which lay loose around her shoulders and partway down her back. He appeared to be deep in thought.
“You don’t have to feel that you have to tell me. If it bothers you to talk about it, you don’t have to.”
“Remember earlier, I said if you can’t share something about yourself with the person you sleep with, that maybe you shouldn’t be sleeping with them?”
Vanessa nodded.
“Well, I guess it’s my turn to walk the walk.” He turned to her slightly. “I guess the easiest place to start is the night my cousin Dylan—Connor’s brother—was killed. The short version is there was a sting operation in the works, a couple of drug dealers. Connor was supposed to be undercover to meet these guys and make the deal. At the last minute, Connor got pulled off the op and Dylan was sent in his place.” Grady paused and took a deep breath. It was obvious that it still bothered him deeply.
“The official version was that Dylan was killed by one of the drug dealers being set up that night. But the truth was the shots were fired before the targets were even out of their cars. Melissa was part of the backup team; she was there. She saw someone slipping out of the building where the shots had come
from carrying a high-powered rifle. Later, she realized this person was not on the roster for the operation. She didn’t realize at the time that he wasn’t supposed to be there because she’d yet to see the final list of agents who were assigned that night.”
“Who had she seen coming out of the building?”
“My brother Brendan.”
“No one else saw him?”
“Apparently not. Anyway, a week or so after that, out of the blue, Melissa told me she was quitting the Bureau—that she was burned out—and she was going to move to Montana. She and I had been dating for quite a while, and we started talking about me putting in for a transfer out west. She said she’d wait for me there, that she couldn’t wait to get away. I’ve known other agents who just got fried from the stress, so it didn’t strike me as particularly odd. But that wasn’t the real reason why she was quitting.”
“What was the reason?”
“The threat against her and her family, and the money she was offered to walk away and forget what she saw that night, came from Brendan.”
“She told you this?”
“No. She never discussed this with me. If she had, Brendan would be in prison right now, instead of in hell, where he belongs. I was able to put it all together after Brendan died.”
“Why did your brother want Connor dead?”
“Brendan was involved in some very nasty business in Central America, and he thought that Connor was onto him. So he planned to use this op as a means to get Connor out of the way.”
“Except at the last minute, Dylan went in Connor’s place.”
Grady nodded. “Brendan was afraid that Melissa had caught on to the fact that he’d fired the killing shot. His way of dealing with her was to make her disappear. Unfortunately, Brendan’s partner—Luther Blue, another agent—wasn’t convinced that Melissa would keep her mouth shut, so he killed her.”
“But there was still Connor …”
“By then, Luther had figured out that Brendan had lost all interest in killing close to home, so he was a liability. Luther set up Brendan, then killed him.”
“And then he would have killed Connor, too?”
“There would have been no need for that. Connor had seen Brendan, not Luther. He had no reason to connect Luther to Brendan’s dealings in Santa Estela.”
“Where’s this Luther guy now?”
“He’s in a maximum-security federal prison serving several life sentences. He offered to name names—give up all his international contacts, from the very top of the trafficking organization to the bottom, in exchange for life in prison and the guarantee that he would not be turned over to any foreign government for prosecution.”
“Trafficking? You mean, as in, people …?”
“Kidnapping and selling kids from Central America on the international black market.”
“That’s just …” She shook her head. There were no words.
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“But if Melissa didn’t tell you all this, who did?”
“It came out in Luther’s confession.”
“And it bothers you that you had to hear the truth from him.”
“The consequences of her lies bother me. If she’d told me the truth, she’d still be alive. Brendan would have been brought to justice along with everyone else in that organization. The operation would have been shut down sooner.”
“I understand all that. But didn’t it hurt you on a personal level that she hadn’t been truthful with you?”
“Well, yes,” he admitted. “That, and the fact that after I realized that she’d known that Brendan was the one who’d bought her silence, I couldn’t help but wonder if she thought that marrying his brother might not have been a form of cheap insurance in case he got the idea later on to shut her up permanently.”
“Oh, Grady, you don’t really think …”
“It’s crossed my mind. The whole let’s-run-off-and-get-married thing was her idea, and while at the time it seemed spontaneous, now I have to ask myself if maybe she hadn’t seen it more as a survival tack than anything else. But …” He slapped his hands on his thighs, then stood. “I guess I’ll never know for certain.”
“Your story makes mine sound like a soap opera.”
“We’re not comparing. I hope you don’t think I was trivializing what happened to you.”
“I didn’t for a second think you were. I thought you were sharing things that mattered with the person you sleep with.”
“That’s exactly what it was.”
“Then maybe you should finish it.”
“I did finish it. I told you everything that happened.”
“But you didn’t talk about what
didn’t
happen.” She tugged on his hand to pull him back down to the bench. “You didn’t get to confront Brendan and ask him why he did what he did. You didn’t get to ask Melissa all the questions you think you have answers to but want to hear her say that you’re right. You are so angry that they both died before they could fess up.”
He sighed and leaned against the back of the bench, his hands in her lap since she held both of them.
“You may not want to hear this, but it’s something that I have to say. And remember that you opened the door for it with what you just told me.”
“Go on.”
“Sometimes people do things that hurt us so deeply, we’re certain that we’re never going to be right inside again. We want justice for the wrong that’s been done to us, but we can’t always make that happen. So then we have a choice. We can hold on to those questions that can never be answered and those feelings that hurt us so much, and we can make them a part of our lives forever. Of course, if we do that, we’ll always hurt, and we’ll always be looking for answers that we’ll never get.”
“Or …?”
“Or we can put them aside, and make them not matter anymore.”
“Excuse me, but are you the same woman who wanted to do a happy dance when I told her that her ex-husband was dead?”
“That would be me. But here’s the thing. I started to put him behind me the day I put him in prison. Yes, I still have scars, inside and out, but they remind me to never let anyone else take charge of my life ever again. And yes, I have issues, but I don’t let them define me. I’ve made a life for myself, and I’m very happy here. I could make having been abused the most important thing in my life, but I’ve chosen to put it aside and focus on what I’ve done to take control of my life.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, that you might want to think about what it’s costing you to hold on to the anger you feel toward your brother and your wife. You can’t change what happened in either of those relationships. You will never know what motivated either of them. Do you know that you can’t seem to mention your brother without your jaw going tight?” Before he could respond, she added, “And why do you stay in that house, Grady? Your wife was murdered there. Why would you want to stay?”
The bells from the church two blocks away began to chime.
“It’s seven,” he told her after all the bells had rung. “We’re supposed to meet Hal and Maggie now.” He stood and took her hand.
“All right,” she told him. “I’m sorry if I went too far.”
He held up a hand as if to stop her from saying anything further. “No need to apologize.”
They walked hand in hand to Walt’s at the end of the pier. When they were almost to the door, Grady
said, “So I’m guessing this whole leave-the-anger-behind thing doesn’t apply to Maggie?”
“Well, of course not. That only applies to
old
stuff that you have no chance of resolving.” She swung the restaurant door open. “Maggie’s going to be a thorn in my butt for a long, long time …”
“There they are.” Maggie elbowed Hal. “They’re just coming in the door now.”
“I see them.” Hal patted her arm. “I want you to calm down, now. Take a deep breath.”
Maggie inhaled deeply several times.
“One more for good measure,” Hal whispered as Vanessa and Grady approached the table.
“Are you all right, Maggie?” Vanessa asked as she hung her bag over the back of the chair next to Hal’s.
“I just …” Maggie paused. “I just had the hiccups.”
“Oh, I hate it when I get those.” Vanessa turned to Hal. “So what happened to your cruise around the Bay?”
“Aborted.” Hal smiled. “Old Carter was having trouble docking that whaler of his, so I had to give him a hand. Then we started talking, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, we were seated out there at the bar having a cold one.”
“How is Carter?” Vanessa took a sip of water from the glass the attentive waiter poured for her.