Freefall (31 page)

"Are you sure you're all right?" Zach asked.

"I'm fine," Sabrina assured him.

Or at least as fine as she could be, given that she still felt like she was in a state of shock.

She was standing at the bedroom window, looking down on the dug-up garden, trying to make sense of what had happened earlier. Fortunately, a three-alarm warehouse fire in Somersett had sent all the reporters who'd been hovering over Swannsea like vultures rushing back onto the ferry for the mainland.

"All these years," she murmured. "Everyone thought my grandfather had taken off. But he never left at all."

She wondered how long it would take to forget the sight of that headless skeleton of her grandfather. How about never?

"Apparently not." His turn to comfort, he came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

"Who do you think killed him?"

"I wouldn't venture a guess. But rumors at the time had him not the most faithful of husbands. And jealousy is always a motive."

"I remember talk about him and Patsy Buchanan," she allowed. "I didn't exactly understand it at the time, but later, well…"

She took a deep breath. Wished she could cry, but the time for tears was long past. "And she and her husband did get a divorce, and he left town not long after that."

"Six months." Zach knew because that was when he and Patsy had had their little fling. "But he also pissed off some investors with that real estate scam he tried to pull off."

"Especially Jeremy Macon. You know, Macon tried to talk me out of this project."

"He wasn't alone. Sumner was pressuring you to sell to him. Harlan was lobbying against the plan at dinner. Hell, even Line told me he had reservations."

"Well, Harlan may not be wild about the idea, but he and my grandfather were close friends. There was no reason for him to kill him. Brad's my age, so he would've been too young. And we can certainly take Line off the suspect list, since not only could he never kill anyone, but he wouldn't have been old enough, either."

"He's four years older than I am. Which would've made him twenty that summer. And anyone can kill. With the right motive."

She turned in his arms and glanced up at him. "I couldn't."

"Not even if you were a mother? To save the life of your child if, say, he or she was kidnapped?"

"Well, of course, but—"

"I'm not saying it wouldn't be understandable." He stroked her hair. "Or even justifiable. Just that everyone operates under their own sense of situational morality."

Sabrina closed her eyes as she considered that idea and decided it would be necessary for a soldier to view life through such a dark prism. She also hoped she'd never be put in a situation where she had to discover her own personal capacity for taking a life.

"Well, it wasn't him."

"Of course it wasn't. I was just playing devil's advocate."

"I can't see Macon having the nerve," she mused.

"Doesn't take a lot of nerve to hire someone to do your dirty work for you."

"No." And wasn't that an ugly thought?

"There's another possibility," Zach said. "He could be one of the so-called slasher's victims."

Icy fingers of fear skittered up her spine. "Surely Nate's not seriously considering that?"

"He's not leaping to any conclusions. But he's not ruling it out, either."

"But that would mean that someone—who could live among us—has been killing people for over a decade."

"Apparently, according to some files Cait Cavanaugh dug up for Nate, there's evidence pointing toward that. Which is why he went on TV tonight and offered that twenty-thousand-dollar reward Harlan put up for any information leading to an arrest."

The chill that had skimmed up her spine spread through her veins, causing her to shiver.

"I need a shower." Not just to warm up but to wash the sense of murder away. At least for a little while. She reached for his hand. Held on tight. "Will you come with me?"

"Funny you should mention that, sugar." He lowered his head and claimed her mouth in a long, breath-stealing kiss. "Coming with you was exactly what I had in mind."

"He didn't do it."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know your father," Nate said patiently. "And I know what it takes to kill another human being. Joshua doesn't have it in him."

"You only know the frail, dying old man," Titania argued. Seemingly unable to remain still, she'd been pacing the floor for the last twenty minutes.

"I've known him as long as I've known you," he said. "Which, may I point out, is all my life. My mama took care of you while your father was at work at Swannsea. You and I took baths together, for Chrissakes."

"We were babies." Her high heels clattered an impatient staccato on the wood floor. Her skirt swirled around her legs as she made a swift, violent turn. "No more than toddlers."

"And even then I thought you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Even prettier than the angel on top of the Christmas tree."

"Don't you dare be calm when I'm not, Nate Spencer!" she shouted. "And don't patronize me."

"I wouldn't dare try." What he
would
dare was to step in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders. "My point, and I
do
have one, is that I've been part of your family, and you've been part of mine, all of our lives. I know your father as well as my own.

"Hell, I like him a whole lot better. And I know, with every fiber of my being, that Joshua did not kill Robert Swann."

"He claimed Robert raped my mother. Back when she was a housemaid at Swannsea and he was outside working in the tea factory."

"For your mother's sake, I hope to hell that wasn't true."

"Do you think Robert Swann was capable of rape?"

"I've no idea. Unlike you, I never spent any time at the farm. I barely knew the guy."

"Whether he did or not, if my father believes it's true, that's a motive for murder."

She pulled away and began pacing again.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Nate felt his hard-won patience beginning to unravel. "No one is looking at your father for motives or anything else. He's not even on the cops' radar screen." He caught her again. By her sexy, curvy hips this time. "So how about we keep it that way?"

"You're willing to compromise an investigation?" She arched a perfectly formed black brow. "For your lover?"

"No." He ran a hand down her hair. Cupped her cheek. "I'm willing to put up with wild, unsubstantiated conjecture about a murder case from the woman I love."

To Nate's horror, her dark chocolate eyes began to swim with moisture. "He believes I'm Robert's child. That he and my mother agreed to keep silent about how she got pregnant. That he'd raise me as his own—"

"Which he did," he reminded her.

"Which he did," she allowed. "And I'll always love him for it, and I'll always be grateful, but what if he's telling the truth about having killed Lucie's husband after my mother died giving birth to me? Can you imagine the grief he must have suffered when she died in childbirth? The anger he'd have felt if the child who'd killed her had been born of a rape by their employer?"

Tears were streaming down her face in silver ribbons.

"It would have been horrible." He brushed a tear away with the pad of his thumb. "But first of all, you didn't kill your mother. Pregnancy's always a risk, and unfortunately, your mother was one of the unlucky ones. But even if any of the story of your paternity's true, Joshua wouldn't have—
couldn't
have—committed murder."

Her makeup, which she always applied with a clever artist's hand, had washed off her face. Her eyeliner and mascara had created raccoon circles around her eyes, and she'd not only chewed off all her lipstick but her teeth were worrying deep impressions into her lower lip.

And her hair, which he remembered his mother combing that foul-smelling straightener through before her first day of school, was a wild ebony corona around her head.

She looked like a madwoman in one of those operas she was always dragging him to in Charleston. At this moment, he would not have been at all surprised if she dropped to her knees on his living-room floor and began belting out an aria.

She was, when it came to business, one of the most practical people, male or female, he'd ever met.

When it came to the rest of her life, Titania had a tendency toward the overdramatic. It was one of the many things he loved about her and just one aspect of her considerable charm.

"Look. Here's the thing," he said, holding her gently and smoothing his hand up and down her back. "Maybe Robert Swann's your biological father. Maybe not. If that's an issue, it's easy enough to find out with a DNA test.

"Maybe your father fantasized about killing him back then. But I'll bet anything that's all it was. A fantasy. Maybe the damn idea got filed away back there in some dark, hidden corner of his brain, and now it's popped out. And he believes it's true the same way he believed, after watching
ET
last month, that aliens from outer space had landed in the Silver Shores parking lot.

"And," he said, pressing a kiss against her brow, "I intend to prove that there's no way he could've killed Swann." He handed her a tissue from a box on the counter.

"How?" she asked, as she swiped at the tears, smearing the black streaks even more.

Because he could feel the tenseness easing out of her beneath his hands, Nate decided it would be safe to smile.

"Because I'm going to apprehend the real bad guy."

"That would do it." She sniffled. Then managed a small, wobbly, very un-Titanialike smile of her own. "You're so good to me, Nathaniel Spencer."

" 'Bout time you noticed!"

She was clearly shocked when he scooped her into his arms. "What do you think you're doing?" she demanded, in a way that assured him that she was already on her way to getting her Titania mojo back.

"I'm taking you to bed," he said. "Where I'm going to be very, very good to you."

He kicked open the bedroom door with his boot. "And then maybe, once you're all warmed up, you'll find out exactly how bad I can be."

"I want you to know—I didn't kill the bastard."

"Hell, Dad, of course you didn't!" Zach stared at his father, shocked that he would even consider that his own son would think such a thing.

They were in the kitchen of the house Zach had grown up in.

Sabrina had assured him that she really would be okay if he left her alone for just a short time, and she'd promised to lock the doors and activate the new security device he'd installed after the break-in, so he had driven over here after receiving his father's call.

"Not that I didn't want to," John said. "Because the guy was pond scum and treated his wife like shit, the way he was always screwing around on her. But she'd already told him that she wanted a divorce when he took off. Or at least when everyone thought he'd taken off."

"7 know you didn't do it.
You
know you didn't do it—"

"What about Sabrina?"

"Sabrina? Hell, she'd be more likely to believe Santa Claus had entered into a conspiracy with the Tooth Fairy to kill her grandfather than to suspect you. You were the closest thing to a father she ever had. She adored you. Still does, for that matter."

"Even after the night crawler incident?"

Zach laughed and felt the welcome release of tension. "Yeah, even after that."

His father silently traced the initials Zach had cut into the kitchen table with the K-Bar knife he'd bought with money he'd made pulling weeds for Lucie Swann back when he was nine. In that same garden where her husband had been found this morning.

His father hadn't been thrilled by his decorating efforts, and Zach hadn't been able to sit down for two days.

"The thing is," John said, "people are going to talk."

Zach shrugged. "So, let them. Sticks and stones and all that."

"You got any pull with Nate?"

"What kind of pull?"

"I can't be questioned about the murder."

Zach was confused. "Why not? We both know you don't have anything to hide."

"Well, now"—John skimmed a hand over his buzz cut—"that's not exactly the case."

"Christ Jesus," Zach said, his frustration building. "Want to cut to the chase and get to what you called me over here to tell me?"

"If I'm asked where I was that night Robert Swann disappeared, I'm going to have to he."

"Okay." Could his old man drag this out any more? "Putting aside the problem about the nitpicky little legalities against lying to the police about a capital crime, why?"

"Because I was with Lucie."

"Lucie was in Somersett. Covering some fancy dress ball at the Wingate Palace for the
Trumpet
."

"Lucie
was
in Somersett. She
was
in the Wingate hotel. But she didn't spend the entire night in the ballroom."

Comprehension struck. "Because she was with you?"

"Because she was with me," John confirmed.

It was Zach's turn to plow his hand through his hair. "You're a regular treasure trove of secrets, aren't you, Pop?"

"Wait until you and Sabrina have kids. See if you tell them everything," John suggested. "Then we'll talk about keeping private stuff exactly that. Private."

He had a point. Still, it was a little weird thinking about his father having a sex life. With Sabrina's grandmother, for Christ's sake.

"How long did the affair last?"

"It started before her marriage to the scum. First time we were together was the night before her wedding."

"Jeez, Pop!" Zach exhaled a sharp breath. Then held up a hand. "Sorry. It's not my place to judge."

Especially given his youthful indiscretions with Mrs. Buchanan, Swann Island's very own desperate housewife. Whose husband had, until the Buchanans' divorce, happened to be his high school football coach.

"I was drunk, like I was most of the time in those days, and she had a case of pre-wedding jitters when we met at the bar in Somersett, where her girlfriends were throwing her a bachelorette party. We both figured it was a one-night thing.

"But then, a few years later, she helped me climb out of the pit I fell into after your mother took off. Which, by the way, she had every right to do, because I'd come back from 'Nam a real mess. I drank a lot, smoked a lot of dope. Even screwed around some with Patsy Buchanan."

Oops.

"I never struck your mother. Not like I learned later that bastard Swann did Lucie. But, like I said, I came back pretty fucked up. The last straw was when I started staying up all night patrolling the perimeter of the yard."

"Armed?"

"No point in doing guard duty if you're not carrying a weapon," his father said dryly.

"We probably would've had problems anyway, because we'd drifted apart while I was away in the SEALs, and neither of us was the other's great love. But your mother deserved better, and I'll always be sorry I couldn't be the husband she thought she was getting when she married that kid in the dress white uniform."

"The whites get them every time," Zach agreed. Comprehension dawned. "Lucie was, wasn't she? Your great love?"

"She was the sun around which my entire universe revolved," John confessed. "If we'd met sooner in life, who knows? She married Robert Swann because, like I said, I sure as hell wasn't any prize back then. And because she'd made a promise to marry him.

"The damn ironic thing was that although we'd become best friends, we didn't sleep together again until the night it now turns out someone gave the scum exactly what he deserved."

"You're going to have to tell that story to Nate. If you're called in for questioning."

"I told you. I won't do that."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because I'm not going to sully a good woman's reputation."

Zach couldn't believe it. Well, actually, he could, because as crazy as it sounded, he could see himself doing the same damn thing. Reputation was everything down here in the Lowcountry. And, like he'd said the other night during the poker game, a gentleman didn't kiss and tell.

"It's not going to get to that," Zach said. He wasn't sure what he was going to do, but he damn well wasn't going to allow his father to take the rap for a murder he'd no way committed.

"We'll call Quinn," he decided.

"What the hell for?"

"He said Phoenix Team is a full-service agency. You work for them."

"I only freelance."

"Doesn't matter. Nate's undoubtedly willing to take all the help he can get to close this case fast. SLED has a lot of other cases they're juggling, and even if Cait is interested enough in the mystery to do a little digging on the side, it might not be enough to keep the FBI spotlight from shining on you.

"So, since we know you didn't do it, we'll let Quinn's mighty Phoenix Team prove it."

"That's not such a bad idea," John said.

"That's why I came up with it," Zach replied.