Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (13 page)

“There’s been nothing in
my
series, because I just heard Mays’s name last week,” she said.

“Who mentioned him to you?”

“A good reporter always protects her sources, Judge Barrington,” she said, smiling. “Or pretty soon she doesn’t have any,” she explained the pragmatism behind that particular ethic.

“Thorne,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“I was simply suggesting that you might use my given name.”

“Of course,” Kate said, her voice almost as breathless as when she’d realized whom she was talking to on the phone. “If that’s what you prefer,” she added.

“May I call you Kate?”

“Of course.”

“Why do I feel that I’ve just made you extremely uncomfortable?” Barrington asked. The amusement was clearly back, touching the deep baritone with intimacy.

This was the way his voice must have sounded before, Kate thought, back when those beautiful debutantes had hung on his every word, their eyes drinking in the perfection of feature that had not changed. He was still as handsome, hiding here in the shadowed existence that he had chosen or had been forced to choose. The sexual magnetism was still there. With the dark, honeyed warmth of his tone she had felt its power move through her body, sensual and inviting.

“Thorne,” she repeated obediently. She had never even called him that in her imagination.

“I know it sounds like one of those names Hollywood dreamed up—Rip or Rock or Cord. I
do
realize how ridiculous it is, but given the options available to her, I confess that I’m grateful my mother had the good sense to settle on Thorne.”

Harlan Thornedyke Barrington, Kate thought—and then she laughed. He was right. By far the lesser of the possible evils. His laughter joined hers, and when she became aware of the sound, she was again unprepared for how intimate it was. He was just a man, she reminded herself. With her fascination, she knew that she truly had made him larger than life.

Just a man. Just like Kahler. Just like any of the other guys she had been involved with through the years.
Been involved with?
she repeated mentally, incredulous at what she had just thought.
Slow down,
she reminded herself. Just because she was here, finally talking to Barrington did not—definitely did not—mean they were involved.

“I thought I’d try talking to Mays,” she said, attempting to get back on track, back to the reason she was here. This might be the only chance she would ever have to discuss these things with Barrington. She couldn’t afford to blow it.

“My advice is to stay as far away from Mays as you can.”

“You think he’s still dangerous.”

“The school bombing isn’t the only crime Mays was involved in. The informant mentioned a lynching, and there were other things. Nothing Mays could be tied to legally, but he was a man filled with hate and more than willing to act on his feelings.”

“Surely after all this time—” Kate began.

“A rattler’s not any less dangerous because he’s old. He’s just bigger and meaner. More full of venom.”

It was a Southernism. Something her grandmother might have said, and like all truisms, it was probably a very accurate opinion where a snake like Wilford Mays was concerned.

“Stay away from Mays,” he warned. “Chances are he has nothing to do with the current bombings. The police would surely have investigated that possibility.”

Only, Kate knew, that wasn’t the case. No one, despite Thorne Barrington’s initial request, had ever checked out Mays. She had even discouraged Kahler when he’d suggested an investigation of the alleged school bomber.

“Why don’t you tell me the things Draper’s widow told you,” Barrington said. “It’s possible there may be something there. At least, I think that’s more likely to result in something useful than pursuing a seventy-year-old bigot.”

Kate glanced down at her notebook and realized that in the dimness of the room she could barely make out her notes, a confusing mixture of real shorthand and her own personal variety. She could hardly ask Barrington to turn on the lights, and he was so accustomed to this omnipresent darkness that he apparently didn’t realize there was a problem with what he’d just proposed.

Her eyes still lowered to the barely discernible words she had scrawled across the ruled paper, she realized there was only one thing to do. She would have to recount from memory what Jackie Draper had told her.

Kate took a deep breath, trying to think where to start. As she began to talk, however, she found that the events of Hall Draper’s life—so ordinary as to be unremarkable—had made an indelible impression. She wasn’t aware of the passage of time, eventually as lost in the narrative as she had been when she had listened to it in that sun-striped room in Tucson.

“And finally, when I asked her if her husband had ever been mixed up in anything…unsavory, she could only think of one thing, almost an afterthought. It was about a girl who had gotten pregnant at fourteen with what
might
have been Hall Draper’s child. She had an abortion, either because she was forced to by her family or because that’s what she wanted. Not what Draper had wanted maybe, but he had felt he was too young to have much effect on that decision. Mrs. Draper said that’s the one thing in his life he regretted. That poor lost baby.”

The words drifted away into the silence. The room was darker now, she realized. The man who had listened without comment to the story of Hall Draper’s life was almost completely enveloped in the shadows that had deepened with the approach of twilight. Suddenly she was embarrassed for having taken up his afternoon on what was apparently an exercise in futility.

“Nothing in that story meant anything to you,” she said. It wasn’t even a question. Barrington had asked for no repetitions, had not commented on or questioned any of what she’d related.

“Perhaps not. Not in the way you’d hoped.” The deep voice was almost disembodied, simply coming out of the darkness. “But obviously, it meant something to you.”

She hadn’t intended to reveal how moved she had been by the images of the Drapers’ private lives, by the decency of Hall Draper, the grief of his widow.

“It just seemed to me that whatever mistake he made—at whatever point in his life—the way he had lived the rest of it should have made up for it. It should have been enough.”

“But it wasn’t,” Thorne said softly.

“No,” she whispered. “He died, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason for his death. Not in anything she told me.”

“Or for any of the others?” he asked.

She shook her head, and then wondered if he could see her, given the darkness. “No,” she whispered.

“Perhaps you won’t understand this, but knowing you feel that way helps.”

“Knowing…?”

“That none of
them
deserved what happened.”

“And that means that you didn’t deserve it either,” she said, suddenly understanding.

“I’ve spent three years wondering what I did. Maybe the answer is, I did nothing.”

“But like Hall Draper—like all of us, I suppose—there are things in your life you aren’t proud of.”

“Like all of us,” he acknowledged.

“What do
you
regret, Judge Barrington?”

It was the question any good reporter would have asked, but she was curious on another level. What did a man, highly respected for his integrity, his dedication to duty, a man who had lived the kind of life Thorne Barrington had, have to regret?

“Perhaps I’ll tell you that the next time we talk,” he said softly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I have another appointment.” It was certainly a lie, graceful and polite, but still a lie.

“Of course,” she said, pushing the unused notebook back into her purse. “I appreciate your agreeing to see me. Thank you for your time.”

“A commodity of which I seem to have an unlimited supply.”

“Does that mean I can come back?” she asked, deliberately injecting the teasing note. “When I have other questions?”

“As long as our conversations remain simply that,” he surprised her by agreeing. “I’m not interested in having my name or my comments appear in your paper. I can assure you that…my situation attracted all the attention I ever desire in this lifetime. If you want my input, then like your other sources, I expect our relationship to remain completely confidential.”

“Of course,” Kate agreed.
Our relationship.
He meant professional, of course, but for some reason the words had echoed more strongly than the rest of the warning. “I never intended to make any part of our conversation public.”

“Thank you,” Thorne said. “Shall I ring for Elliot or do you think you can find your way out?” There was a pause before he added, his voice touched with humor, “Again.”

His timing had been impeccable, and she paid tribute by laughing. “Thank you, but I believe I can manage.”

She stood up, gathering up her bag, and began to cross to the sliding doors. Before she reached them, she remembered the retriever. “Where’s your dog?” she asked.

“Elliot’s fastened him in one of the rooms upstairs. He was afraid he’d frighten you.” The amusement was still there, pleasantly intriguing in the deep voice. “For some reason, Elliot is under the impression that the retriever’s a guard dog.”

“Then I’m glad you’ve got a fence,” she said.

She let herself out of the parlor, but she stopped in the wide foyer, looking up the stairs where Elliot and the puppy were waiting for her to leave. Then they would once again become a part of the limited world of the man they obviously adored. The man who had, for some reason, allowed her to enter this very private domain. Who had indicated he would allow it again, providing she, too, guarded the privacy which he seemed to value above anything else—even, it seemed, above human companionship.

H
E LISTENED
to the closing of the front door and the faint noise made by the crystals of his grandmother’s Waterford chandelier. When those sounds had faded, he sat alone in the shadows, the house again completely silent.

It had been far too pleasant to sit and listen to her voice, to listen as she told the story of Hall Draper’s life. It had been obvious that she had been deeply moved by her encounter with Draper’s widow. The emotion had been there, enriching the quiet narrative. Clearly, she admired the kind of man Draper had been. Perhaps as she might have admired the man Thorne Barrington had once been, the kind of man he knew he was no longer.

She was a reporter working on a story. That was why she had come here. Nothing else.
I’m not news,
he had told her the first night, but even then he had known that he was, and that despite the passage of time, he probably always would be. He understood exactly why Kate August wanted to talk to him. What he didn’t understand was why, given the situation, he had agreed.

Chapter Seven

Kate had spent another nearly sleepless night. She had not even entered the bedroom this time, having learned during the dawn hours of the night before the futility of trying to sleep there. She had instead pulled out spare bedding and made a nest on the couch, but sleep again eluded her. It might have had something to do with the fact that she couldn’t bear to turn off the lamp and plunge the apartment into darkness. Or it might have been because of the voices that kept invading her mind.

The soft warmth of Barrington’s amused baritone. Kahler’s, slightly accented, in the darkness of the restaurant parking lot in Tucson, telling her about another bomber. Jackie Draper’s whispering tribute to her husband—a good man.

The lack of sleep was beginning to show, she thought, putting on her makeup the next morning. The small bathroom light clearly illuminated the shadows under her eyes, and in them was the same frustration she had heard in Kahler’s voice.

This had all gone on too long. Too many people had died, and she knew in her heart that there was a connection between them. Figuring out what that link might be was the key to stopping Jack. Dangerous or not, she knew that she could not give up the story. She didn’t bother to deny, to herself at least, that there were a couple of personal aspects to the puzzle that she wasn’t ready to step away from. Especially not now.

It had only taken her a couple of hours after she arrived at her desk to locate Wilford Mays. He was still living in the same house where he had been born. He was even listed in the local telephone directory. However reprehensible the rest of the world felt his actions to be, Mays had felt no need to hide from them.

She hadn’t called to make an appointment. She had simply left a message for Lew and then driven out to the small rural community. It was only as she drove up the unpaved road the locals had told her led to Mays’s house that she allowed herself to admit this might not be a good idea.

The sprawling farmhouse-style board-and-batten sat under the spread of an oak that was at least a couple of hundred years old. The house itself had probably been built in the early years of the century. There was a profusion of multi-colored impatiens and petunias trailing from baskets hanging between the square white columns of a porch that ran the length of the house.

As she walked up the liriope-bordered sidewalk, Kate could see that someone was sitting in the old-fashioned porch swing. The woman, whom Kate guessed to be Mays’s wife, had stretched her small, rounded body to its full height in an attempt to identify the driver of the car that had pulled into her yard.

“Hello,” Kate called, as she climbed the wooden steps. She knew that despite the xenophobia of city dwellers, she was not likely to be unwelcome here, even if she were uninvited. “Miz Mays?” she questioned, using, without any conscious decision, the old Southern form of address she had been taught as a child.

“I’m Velma Mays,” the woman answered, stopping the gentle sway of the swing with one foot. Mrs. Mays stood up, holding the blue-and-white-speckled colander into which she’d been snapping beans. Her print dress had been carefully ironed, the starched cotton appearing as fresh as it must have when she’d put it on this morning. There wasn’t a strand of iron-gray hair out of place, the curls so tightly permed that they didn’t look capable of escaping from the style they’d been tortured into.