River's End (27 page)

“Why wouldn’t I? You talk more than any three people I know put together.”

“And you don’t talk enough, but I’ve got your voice in my head. I had a dream about you last night, all soft, watery colors and slow motion. We made love on the bank of the river, and the grass was cool and damp and wild with flowers. I woke up with the taste of you in my mouth.”

There was a moment of silence, a quiet catch of breath. “That’s very interesting.”

“Is someone in your office?”

“Momentarily. Thanks, Curtis, I’ll take care of that.” There was another pause. “That riverbank is a public area.”

He laughed so hard he had to slide onto a stool. “I’m
becoming seriously crazy about you, Liv. Did you like the flowers?”

“They’re very nice and completely unnecessary.”

“Sure they were. They make you think of me. I want you to keep me right in the front of your mind, Liv, so we can pick things up when I get there.”

“When do you plan to make the trip?”

“One or two weeks—sooner, if I can manage it.”

“The lodge is booked well in advance this time of year.”

“I’ll think of something. Liv, I need to tell you I’ve seen Tanner, spoken with him. He’s here in Los Angeles.”

“I see.”

“I thought you’d feel better knowing where he is.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. I have to go—”

“Liv, you can tell me how you feel. Aside from the book, just as someone who cares about you. You can talk to me.”

“I don’t know how I feel. I only know I can’t let where he is or what he’s doing change my life. I’m not going to let anything or anyone do that.”

“You may find out some changes don’t have to hurt. I’ll let you know when I plan to come in. Keep thinking about me, Olivia.”

She hung up, let out a long breath. “Keep dreaming,” she murmured and skimmed a finger over the petals of a sunny daisy.

She hadn’t been able to resist keeping them in her office where she could see them when she was stuck at her desk and itching to get outside.

She’d recognized what he’d done as well, and found it incredibly sweet and very clever. The flowers he ordered were all from the varieties he had in his own garden. The garden she hadn’t been able to resist. He had to know that looking at them would make her think of him.

She’d have thought of him anyway.

And she’d lied when she’d told him she didn’t miss him. It surprised her how much she did and worried her just a little to realize she wished they were different people in a different
situation. Then they could be lovers, maybe even friends, without the shadows clinging to the corner of their relationship.

She’d never been friends with a lover, she thought. Had never really had a lover, as that term added dimension and intimacy to simple sex.

But she thought Noah would insist on being both. If she wanted him, she would have to give more than she’d been willing, or able, to give to anyone before.

One more thing to think about, she decided, and rubbing the tension from her neck, swiveled back to her keyboard and began to input her ideas for the fall programs with an eye to the elementary school field trips she hoped to implement.

She answered the knock on her door with a grunt.

“Was that a come in or go to hell?” Rob wanted to know as he gently shook the package he carried.

“It’s come in to you, and go to hell for anyone else. I’m just working out some fall programs.” She angled her head as she swiveled her chair around. “What’s in the box?”

“Don’t know. It came to the lodge, looks like an overnight from Los Angeles, to you.”

“Me?”

“I’d guess it’s from the same young man who sent you the flowers.” He set the package on the desk. “And I say he has fine taste in women.”

“Which you say with complete objectivity.”

“Of course.” Rob sat on the corner of the desk, reached for her hands. “How’s my girl?”

“I’m fine.” She gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry about me, Grandpop.”

“I’m allowed to worry. It’s part of the job description.” And she’d been so tense, so pale when she’d come back from California. “It doesn’t matter that he’s out, Livvy. I’ve made my peace with that. I hope you will.”

“I’m working on it.” She rose, moved away to tidy files that didn’t need tidying. “Noah just called. He wanted to let me know he’d seen him, spoken to him.”

“It’s best you know.”

“Yes, it is. I appreciate that he understands that, respects that. That he doesn’t treat me as if I were so fragile I’d break, that I needed to be protected from . . .” She trailed off, felt a wave of heat wash into her face. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right. I don’t know if we did the right thing, Livvy, bringing you here, closing everything else out. We meant it for the best.”

“Bringing me here was exactly the right thing.” She dropped the files and stepped over to hug him tight. “No one could have given me more love or a better home than you and Grandma. We won’t let thoughts of him come in here and make us question it.” Her eyes stormed with emotion when she drew back. “We won’t.”

“I still want what’s best for you. I’m just not as sure as I once was what it is. This young man . . .” He nodded toward the flowers. “He’s bringing you an awful lot to face at one time. But he’s got a straight look in his eye, makes me want to trust him with you.”

“Grandpop.” She bent, kissed his cheek. “I’m old enough, and smart enough, to decide that for myself.”

“You’re still my baby. Aren’t you going to open the package?”

“No, it’ll only encourage him.” She grinned. “He’s trying to charm me.”

“Is he?”

“I suppose he is, a little. He’s planning on coming back soon. I’ll decide just how charmed I am when I see him again. Now, go to work, and let me do the same.”

“He comes back around, I’m keeping an eye on him.” Rob winked as he got up and headed for the door. Then he stopped, one hand on the knob, and glanced back. “Did we keep you too close, Livvy? Hold you too tight?” He shook his head before she could answer. “Yes or no, you grew your own way. Your mother’d be proud of you.”

When the door closed behind him, she sat down, struggled with the tears that were a hot mix of grief and joy. She hoped he was right, that her mother would be proud, and not see her
daughter as a woman who was too aloof, too hard, too afraid to open herself to anyone but the family who’d always been there.

Would Julie, bright, beautiful Julie, ask her daughter, Where are your friends? Where are the boys you pined for, the men you loved? Where are the people you’ve touched or made part of your life?

What would the answer be? Olivia wondered. There’s no one. No one.

It made her so suddenly, so unbearably sad the tears threatened again. Blinking them away, she stared at the package on her desk.

Noah, she thought. He was trying to reach her. Wasn’t it time she let him?

She dug out the Leatherman knife from her pocket, used the slim blade to break the sealing tape. Then she paused, let herself feel the anticipation, the pleasure. Let herself think of him as she lifted the lid.

Hurrying now, she probed through the protective blizzard of Styrofoam chips, spilling them out onto the desk as she worked the contents out. Glass or china, she thought, some sort of figurine. She wondered if he’d actually tracked down a statue of a marmot, was already laughing at the idea when she freed the figure.

The laugh died in her throat, tumbled with the avalanche of icy panic that roared through her chest. Her own rapid breathing became a crashing scream in her head. She dropped the figurine as if it were a live snake, poised to strike.

And stared, trembling and swaying, at the benevolent and beautiful face of the Blue Fairy poised atop the music box.

“I never wanted to be alone.” Sam held the coffee Noah had given him and squinted against the sun. “Being alone was like a punishment to me. A failure. Julie was good at it, often preferred it. She didn’t need the spotlight the way I did.”

“Did or do?” Noah asked, and watched Sam smile.

“I’ve learned there are advantages to solitude. Julie always knew that. When we separated, when I bought the place in Malibu, the prospect of living there alone was nearly as terrifying as living without her. I don’t remember much about the Malibu house. I guess it was similar to this.”

He glanced back at the house, the creamy wood, clear streams of glass, the splashes of flowers in stone tubs. Then out to the ocean. “The view wouldn’t have been much different. You like it here, being alone?”

“My kind of work requires big chunks of solitude.”

Sam only nodded and fell silent.

Noah had debated the wisdom of conducting the interviews at his own place. In the end, it had seemed most practical. They’d have the privacy he required and, by setting up on the deck, give Sam his wish to be outside. He hadn’t been able to come up with a good argument against it, as Sam already had his address.

He waited while Sam lit another cigarette. “Tell me about the night of August twenty-eighth.”

“I didn’t want to be alone,” Sam said again. “I wasn’t working, had just fired my agent. I was pissed off at Julie. Who the hell did she think she was, kicking me out of the house when she was the one fucking around? I called Lydia. I wanted company, I wanted sympathy. She hated Julie, so I knew she’d say what I wanted to hear. I figured we’d get high and have sex—like old times. That’d teach Julie a lesson.”

His hand bunched into a fist on his knee, and he began to tap it there, rhythmically. “She wasn’t home. Her maid said she was out for the evening. So I was pissed off about that, too. Couldn’t depend on anyone, no one was there when you needed them. Worked myself up pretty good. There were others I could have called, but I thought fuck them. I did a line to prime myself up, then got in the car and headed into L.A.”

He paused, rubbing lightly at his temple as if he had a headache brewing, then went back to tapping his fist on his knee. “I don’t know how many clubs I hit. It came out in the trial, different people seeing me at different places that night. Saying I was belligerent, looking for trouble. How did they know what I was looking for when I didn’t?”

“Witnesses stated you were looking for Lucas Manning, got into a shoving match with security at one of the clubs, knocked over a tray of drinks at another.”

“Must have.” Sam moved his shoulder casually, but his hand continued its hard, steady rhythm. “It’s a blur. Bright lights, bright colors, faces, bodies. I did another line in the car. Maybe two before I drove to our house. I’d been drinking, too. I had all this energy and anger and all I could think of was Julie. We’d settle this, goddamn it. Once and for all.”

He sat back, closed his eyes. His hand stilled, then began to claw at his knee. “I remember the way the trees stood out against the sky, like a painting. And the headlights of other cars were like suns, burning against my eyes. I could hear the sound of my heartbeat in my head. Then it goes two ways.”

He opened his eyes, blue and intense, and stared into Noah’s. “The gate’s locked. I know he’s in there with her. The son of a bitch. When she comes on the intercom I tell her to open the gate, I need to talk to her. I’m careful, really careful, to keep my tone calm. I know she won’t let me in if she knows I’ve been using. She won’t let me in if she knows I’m primed. She tells me it’s late, but I persist, I persuade. She gives in. I drive back to the house. The moonlight’s so bright it hurts my
eyes. And she’s standing in the door, the light behind her. She’s wearing the white silk nightgown I’d bought her for our last anniversary. Her hair’s down around her shoulders, her feet are bare. She’s so beautiful. And cold, her face is cold, like something carved out of marble. She tells me to make it quick, she’s tired, and walks into the parlor.

“There’s a glass of wine on the table, and the magazines. The scissors. They’re silver and long-bladed sitting on the glass top. She picks up her wine. She knows I’m high now, so she’s angry. ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks me. ‘Why are you doing this to me, to Livvy?’ ”

Sam lifted a hand to his lips, rubbed them, back and forth, back and forth. “I tell her it’s her fault, hers because she let Manning put his hands on her, because she put her career ahead of our marriage. It’s an old argument, old ground, but this time it takes a different turn. She says she’s through with me, there’s no chance for us, and she wants me out of her life. I make her sick, I disgust her.”

Still the actor, he punched the words, used pauses and passion. “She doesn’t raise her voice, but I can see the words coming out of her mouth. I see them as dark red smoke, and they choke me. She tells me she’s never been happier since she kicked me out and has no intention of weighing herself down with a has-been with a drug problem. Manning isn’t just a better actor, he’s a better lover. And I was right all along, she’s tired of denying it. He gives her everything I can’t.”

Noah watched Sam’s eyes go glassy and narrowed his own.

“She turned away from me as if I was nothing,” Sam muttered, then lifted his voice to a half shout. “As if everything we’d had together was nothing. The red smoke from her words is covering my face, it’s burning in my throat. The scissors with the long silver blades are in my hands. I want to stab them through her, deep inside her. She screams, the glass flies out of her hand, shatters. Blood pours out of her back. Like I’d pulled a cork out of a bottle of perfect red wine. She stumbles, there’s a crash. I can’t see through the smoke, just keep hacking with
the scissors. The blood’s hot on my hands, on my face. We’re on the floor, she’s crawling, the scissors are like part of my hand. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop.”

His eyelids shuttered closed now, and the hands on his knees were bone-white fists. “I see Livvy in the doorway, staring at me with her mother’s eyes.”

His hand shook as he picked up his coffee. He sipped, long and deep like a man gulping for liquid after wandering the desert. “That’s one way I remember it. Can I have something cold now? Some water?”

“All right.” Noah switched off the recorder, rose, went inside to the kitchen. Then he laid his palms on the counter. Icy sweat shivered over his skin. The images of the murder were bad enough. He’d read the transcripts, studied the reports. He’d known what to expect. But it had been the perfect artistry of Sam’s narrative that knotted his stomach. That, and the thought of Olivia crawling out of her child’s bed and into a nightmare.

How many times had she relived it? he wondered.

He poured two glasses of mineral water over ice, braced himself to go back out and continue.

“You’re wondering if you can still be objective,” Sam said when Noah stepped out again. “You’re wondering how you can stand to sit here with me and breathe the same air.”

“No.” Noah passed him the water, sat. “That’s part of my job. I’m wondering how you live with yourself. What you see when you look in the mirror every morning.”

“They kept me on suicide watch for two years. They were right. But after a while, you learn to go from one day to the next. I loved Julie, and that love was the best part of my life. It still wasn’t enough to make me a man.”

“And twenty years in prison did?”

“Twenty years in prison made me sorry I’d destroyed everything I’d been given. Cancer made me decide to take what was left.”

“What’s left, Sam?”

“The truth, and facing it.” He took another sip of water. “I
remember that night another way, too. It starts off the same, toking up, cruising, letting the drug feed the rage. But this time the gates are open when I get there. Boy, that pisses me off. What the hell is she thinking? We’re going to have a little talk about that. If Manning’s inside . . . I know damn well he’s in there. I can see him pumping himself into my wife. I think about killing him, with my bare hands, while she watches. The door of the house is wide open. Light’s spilling out. This really gets me. I walk in, looking for a fight. I start to go upstairs, sure I’ll catch them in bed, but I hear the music from the parlor. They must be fucking in there, with the music on, the door open and my daughter upstairs. Then I . . .”

He stopped, took a long drink, then set the glass aside. “There’s blood everywhere. I didn’t even recognize it for what it was at first. It’s too much to be real. There’s broken glass, smashed. The lamp we’d bought on our honeymoon is shattered on the floor. My head’s buzzed from coke and vodka, but I’m thinking Jesus, Jesus, there’s been a break-in. And I see her. Oh God, I see her on the floor.”

His voice broke, wavered, quavered, just as perfectly delivered as the stream of violence in his first version. “I’m kneeling beside her, saying her name, trying to pick her up. Blood, there’s blood all over her. I know she’s dead, but I tell her to wake up, she has to wake up. I pulled the scissors out of her back. If I took them out, they couldn’t hurt her. And there was Livvy, staring at me.”

He took a cigarette from the pack on the table and struck a match, and the flame shivered as if in a brisk wind. “The police didn’t buy that one.” He blew out smoke. “Neither did the jury. After a while, I stopped buying it, too.”

“I’m not here to buy anything, Sam.”

“No.” He nodded but it was a sly look, a con’s look. “But you’ll wonder, won’t you?”

“According to Manning, he and Julie never had an affair. Not for lack of trying on his part, he was up-front about that.” Noah stood with his father outside the youth center while a
group of kids fought through a pickup game on the newly blacktopped basketball court. “He was in love with her—or infatuated, spent a lot of time with her—but she considered him a friend.”

“That’s the way he played it during the investigation.”

“Did you believe him?”

Frank sighed, shook his head as he watched one of his boys bobble a pass. “He was convincing. The housekeeper’s testimony backed him up. She swore no man had ever spent the night in that house but the man her mistress had been married to. She was fiercely loyal to Julie and could have been covering. But we never shook her on it. The only evidence to the contrary was Sam Tanner’s belief and the usual gossip. As far as the case went, it didn’t matter one way or the other. Tanner believed in the affair, so to him it was real and part of the motive.”

“Don’t you find it odd that Manning and Lydia Loring ended up as lovers even for only a few months?”

“That’s why they call it Holly-Weird, pal.”

“Just hypothetically, if you hadn’t had Tanner cold, where else would you have looked?”

“We had him cold, and we still looked. We interviewed Manning, Lydia, the housekeeper, the agent, the family. Particularly the Melbournes, as they both worked for Julie. Actually, we took a long look at Jamie Melbourne. She inherited a considerable sum upon her sister’s death. We went through Julie’s fan mail, culled out the loonies and took a look at them in case an obsessed fan had managed to get in through the security. The fact is, Tanner was there. His prints were all over the murder weapon. He had motive, means and opportunity. And his own daughter saw him.”

Frank shifted. “I had some trouble with the case during the first few days. It didn’t hold as solid as I wanted it to.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t hold?”

“Just that the way Tanner behaved, the way he mixed up two different nights—two different altercations with Julie in his
head—or pretended to . . . It didn’t sit at first. Then he lawyered and went hard. I realized he’d been playing me. Don’t let him play you, Noah.”

“I’m not.” But he jammed his hands into his pockets, paced away, paced back. “Just hear me out. A few days ago he told me two versions of that night. The first jibes with your findings, almost a perfect match. He’s into the part when he’s describing it. He could’ve been replaying a murder scene in a brutal movie. Then he tells me the other way, the way he got there and found her. His hands shake, and he goes pale. His voice races up and down like a roller coaster.”

“Which did you believe?”

“Both.”

Frank nodded. “And he told you last the way that makes him innocent. Let that impression dig the deepest.”

Noah hissed out a breath. “Yeah, I thought of that.”

“Maybe he still wishes it was the second way. One thing I believed, Noah, is that after, he wished she hadn’t opened the door that night. And you can’t ever forget that one vital point,” Frank added. “He’s an actor and knows how to sell himself.”

“I’m not forgetting,” Noah murmured. But he was wondering.

He decided to swing by and see his mother. He planned on heading to Washington the following day. This time he’d fly up, then rent a car. He didn’t want to waste time on the road.

Celia was sitting on their little side deck, going through the mail and sipping a tall glass of herbal sun tea. She lifted her cheek for Noah to kiss, then wagged a form letter at him. “Have you seen this? They’re threatening to cut the funding for the preservation of the northern elephant seal.”

“Must’ve missed that one.”

“It’s disgraceful. Congress votes itself a raise, spends millions of taxpayer dollars on studies to study studies of studies, but they’ll sit back and let another of the species on our planet become extinct.”

“Go get ’em, Mom.”

She huffed, put the letter aside and opened another. “Your father’s at the youth center.”

“I know, I was just there. I thought I’d come by and see you before I headed to Washington tomorrow.”

“I’m glad you did. Why don’t you stay for dinner? I’ve got a new recipe for artichoke bottoms I want to try out.”

“Gee, that sounds . . . tempting, but I have to pack.”

“Liar,” she said with a laugh. “How long will you be gone?”

“Depends.”

“Is the book giving you trouble?”

“Some, nothing major.”

“What then?”

“I’ve got a little hang-up going.” He picked up her tea, sipped. Winced. She refused to add even a grain of sugar. “A personal-level hang-up. On Olivia MacBride.”