Rachel Lee (15 page)

Hardy's voice made her open her eyes. She saw him through a blur, as if he were underwater.

"Joni?"

"It doesn't matter." The tears fell more heavily, as if they were coming through a dam that had broken. No sobs wracked her; there was just the steady flood from her eyes. "Damn it," Hardy said. He jumped up from the table and began to pace the kitchen. "Joni... God, I'm going to kill Witt. I'm going to kill him."

She didn't answer that. What was the point? It wasn't Witt, anyway.

It was her mother. Apparently Witt hadn't even guessed at the truth.

But her mother had known and had kept the secret way past reason. She could understand Hannah not telling her while

Lewis was still alive, but what had been the excuse after that?

"It's not Witt," she said finally. Although it was. Snaking from somewhere deep inside her was a burning fury that a man who had grieved twelve years for his daughter was ready to throw her, his niece, away like so much trash he didn't need anymore.

Her tears stopped flowing, as if there was no more moisture inside her.

She felt them drying on her face, making it feel stiff. Hardy stopped pacing and returned to the table.

"Talk to me, Joni. I can't help if you don't tell me what's going on."

"You can't help. No one can help."

"But it's not Witt?"

"No. Witt's just ... I don't know. All I know is that if I don't get away from Karen I'm going to scream!"

Hardy looked at her, searching her face. On the surface, her remark was patently ridiculous. Get away from a girl who'd been dead for more than a decade? Yet he felt the truth in the words, however the sentence was phrased. Karen was probably more a part of their lives dead than she would have been if she'd lived. "Will you get away from her if you leave town?"

She hesitated, then shook her head. "I guess not. I won't really get away from Witt, either. Damn Hannah!"

"What did Hannah do?"

What to say? Telling him the truth would only make it worse. It was better to let it lie. Yet she heard herself speaking, even as she fought to keep the words inside. "Witt is ... my father!"

Hardy reeled. He wondered how a secret like that could have been kept in a town this size for all these years, then realized. Not even Witt had known. "Jesus."

He began to understand why Joni had been wandering the streets like a lost waif. If Barbara had told him something like that, he didn't know how he would have responded. It would be easy to laugh it off and say,

"Well, at least I know I'm not the spawn of the town drunk," but he felt deep inside that he wouldn't feel that way at all. He would feel as if everything in his life was a lie. As if he couldn't trust his own mother. As if he didn't really know who he was.

"I'm sorry, Joni," he said, finding the words about as inadequate as anything could be.

"Yeah," she said, a bitter edge in her voice. "My mother's a cheat and a liar, my uncle's a cheat and an ass, and Karen's not just my cousin, but my sister. Which I guess means I'm never going to get away from her. Or Witt. Or anything ... anything else." Her voice broke, then faded.

Hardy watched helplessly as Joni's entire face crumpled into a grimace of anguish. But she didn't weep again. Apparently she had no tears left. "I take it Hannah told you that this morning?"

She nodded.

"Jesus H. Christ. Why now? Wasn't there already enough going on?"

"She doesn't want me to leave."

"God." Frustrated, he shoved his chair back from the table and started pacing again. "I can't believe she used that as a weapon. Not now."

"I don't think she meant it to be a weapon."

He looked over his shoulder at her. "It doesn't matter, does it? It's still a crater in your life."

"Yeah." She drew a shaky breath. "Nothing feels the same. I don't feel the same. I feel... I don't know how I feel."

"I'm sorry Mom isn't here," he said. "She always has good ideas. I'm just... Hell, Joni, I'm just flummoxed. I don't know what to say."

"Neither do I." Her mouth trembled. "Everything just blew up in my face. All I can think is ouch."

He nodded. "Big ouch. Damn." Shaking his head, he paced some more, trying to absorb all this. Trying to absorb the fact that he'd invited another one of Witt's daughters into his house. Oh, man, wasn't that going to make a stink. "When's she telling Witt?"

"Not now. He's too sick."

"It might be wise to be two counties away when she does."

"If she does." It was odd, but having spat the horrible truth out to another person, she could almost feel the world stabilizing under her a bit. Not that she was going to get over this quickly, but she didn't feel quite so rocky as she had a few minutes ago. But nothing, absolutely nothing, was ever going to be the same again.

"It's amazing," she said slowly, "how fast your life can be permanently changed. All it takes is an eye blink."

"Like when the drank driver hit Karen and me."

"Exactly." She didn't even mind him drawing Karen into the conversation again. "I just wish I had known sooner."

She picked up her spoon, sipped a little more chowder and thought she was doing well. She was going to be all right. Things no longer seemed as dire as they had that morning.

What had really changed, after all? They were all the same people they had been twenty-four hours ago. All that had changed were a few perceptions. Little things, really.

Just little things.

But as she watched her hand start to tremble again and felt her throat tighten until it hurt, she knew it wasn't going to be that easy.

Perceptions, were everything. And hers had been irrevocably shattered.

Witt looked a lot better that afternoon. He was off the respirator, and his color had improved. Hannah, with a professional eye, watched the heart-monitor log steady lambda waves. There was a little glitch in them, which she didn't have the expertise to interpret, but she imagined it must come from the bit of heart muscle that had died last night.

He was sound asleep, so she sat by his bed, waiting for him to wake.

In all the uproar last night, and then this morning with Joni, she had scarcely admitted to herself just how much she feared losing Witt. She loved her daughter more than life, but Witt was . Witt was the stability in her world. He was the shoulder she had always been able to lean on, the ear that was always willing to listen. He'd stood by her and Joni after Lewis's death, stalwart and ever ready to help them.

She didn't know how she would have handled any of that, except for Witt. She would have been alone with her guilt, grief and shame, and what could she have done? Lean on Joni?

Joni had no idea how much Witt had spared her just by being there to support Hannah and to play father to Joni.

Joni, like all children, had taken her childhood for granted. She would never guess how much she had been sheltered and protected from, or how fast she might have had to grow up if Hannah had had no one else to lean on. But Hannah did. And she was honest enough to know that even if she had tried not to lean, in subtle ways she still would have.

So Witt had preserved Joni's childhood.

But Witt was like that. Frustrating as he was with his attitude toward Hardy Wingate, annoyed as she was for the way he had treated Joni, Hannah knew what a strong, generous and loving man Witt Matlock was.

Witt had raised his younger brother Lewis after their parents died. It was Witt who had gone to work in the mine to ensure that Lewis could go to medical school. And even after Hannah had married Lewis and could have supported him the rest of the way through school, Witt had continued to send the same monthly contribution, saying Hannah shouldn't be responsible for Lewis's education, despite the fact that Witt had started his own young family.

The end result was that when Hannah got pregnant with Joni and had to stop working for a while, Lewis had been able to finish school. Hannah and Lewis had been grateful, more grateful than they could say. Once they were making some decent money, they'd tried to pay Witt back, but he refused, saying it wasn't a loan.

And Witt had continued to work at the mine. Then Witt's wife had died, leaving him a single parent with a young daughter. Not too long after that, Lewis had been killed. It had been as natural as breathing for Hannah and Witt to get together and buck each other up. And neither one of them ever mentioned that night. The night Joni was conceived.

Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe they should have been more honest with each other. Maybe if she'd told him years ago that Joni was his daughter he would have gotten over Karen better than he had. Or maybe, at the very least, he wouldn't have disowned her last night.

Hannah sighed, trying to banish the thoughts that were whirling in her head like a bunch of angry bees, all trying to get her attention. What was done was done. She couldn't change it. Now she could only hope to mend it.

Along about three, Witt stirred. He moved his arm, then his eyes sprang open, as if panic had seized him. Hannah heard the beep of the heart monitor speed up, and she reached out immediately to touch his hand.

"Witt, it's okay. You're okay." She rose and stood beside him, making it easier for him to see her.

"Hannah." He whispered her name, a raspy sound. "I'm right here, Witt. Do you remember what happened?"

"No...."

"You had a heart attack. But you're fine now. You're going to be just fine."

But she saw the fear in his gaze, and she knew it wasn't going to be fine. How could it? It would be a long time before he stopped fearing that he could drop dead at any instant.

"What day is it?"

"Sunday. You had the heart attack last night. It's three o'clock in the afternoon."

He nodded and closed his eyes. "Work. Call Shep."

"I'll call him."

Then he turned his face to the wall and wouldn't speak another word.

And Hannah sat there for a long time, wondering just how much the stubbornness of one man was going to cost her.

Not knowing what else to do with a woman who was brokenhearted over problems he could do nothing to solve, Hardy coaxed Joni back into his office cum-studio and showed her the model he was building for his next big bid. Much to his relief, she was actually interested in it.

In fact, it seemed to delight her.

"It's like a wonderful (tollhouse," she said. She wasn't exactly jumping up and down, but it was the most emotion he'd heard out of her, other than grief, since he'd picked her up off the street a few hours ago. To his way of thinking, that was a major improvement.

"That's kind of the idea," he said. "Some people just build exteriors, but I like my models to open up so the customer can get a feel for the interior, too. It takes a lot more time, of course, but I think it pays for itself."

"Did you do this for Witt, too?"

He nodded and pointed to the far corner of the room. "That's a copy of the model I did for him. Go ahead and look at it."

"I never would have thought of making a hotel look like this," she said as she touched one corner of the model with her index finger. "Never."

"I wanted it to resemble one of those grand old hotels. Or even a large bed-and-breakfast. I was thinking homey."

"I like it."

He pulled out the stool at his worktable and started gluing some slivers of wood onto his new model, pretending to work when he was, in fact, watching Joni with an eagle eye.

He was seriously worried about her and didn't want her to be alone for a second. The problem was figuring out how to keep her from being alone without making her feel as if she were under guard.

And it terrified him, when he was honest about it, to once again have the life of one of Witt's daughters in his hands.

He tried to tell himself he was being too melodramatic, but he didn't believe it. Not after finding Joni wandering the streets in a near daze, half-frozen. He wanted to believe she would have found her way home eventually, but he wasn't sure of that at all. Right now he had the feeling she never wanted to lay eyes on Hannah or Witt again.

So maybe she would have gone to one of her girlfriends' houses. Maybe she would have discovered, even in her shocked state, that she still wanted to live.

Or maybe not. That possibility was keeping him on tenterhooks.

She seemed enthralled with the model, so he allowed himself to relax a bit and give a little more attention to what he was working on.

"It must take you a lot of time to build these," Joni remarked, moving on to another model.

"It keeps me busy. I generally do the modeling in the evening and on weekends."

"How come?"

"If I've got a job actually under way, I have to spend most days supervising and keeping things moving. So I try to treat the modeling like a hobby."

She came back to his worktable and sat across from him. "What exactly do you do?"

"I'm an architect, and I act as my own general contractor. Which means I figure out designs for jobs, figure out the cost of building them, then bid on them. If I win the bid, I hire people to do the work and supervise them."

"That must keep you busy."

"When I'm on a job. I'm between them now, so I've got a little time on my hands."

She nodded. "That won't last, will it?"

He shrugged. "It might. So far I've been jolting along, doing jobs, then sitting on my hands for a bit. It's okay. It's keeping me busy enough. And if things started to overlap a whole lot, I'd have to hire some permanent employees to help out. I'm not sure I want to do that yet."

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "Right now it's all my baby. I'm on top of everything.

I don't have to rely on other people to do it right because I don't have the time to check up on them."

"I guess I can see that. Do you think you'll ever want to expand?"

"Maybe. I could see it if there was a lot of good work available. If well, if I ever had a family, it'd probably be a good thing to do." He stole a quick glance at her, wondering how she would respond to that.