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He slammed down the newspaper and gave up all pretense of ignoring her. “You know, for somebody trying to get my help, you sure are going about it the wrong way.”
“Am I?” She cocked her head. “So what would work? I’ve tried asking and pleading.”
“And now you’re up to badgering and aggravating.”
“I’m sorry if you feel badgered. I honestly didn’t come here to be a pest. If I could get the information I need any other way, I’d pack up, leave and never bother you again.”
“So do it.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I have to finish this book. The good things James did in his life are in danger of being lost. Instead of honoring him as the genius he was, most people remember him only as a drugged-out rock star killed in a plane crash.”
“And you think you can single-handedly change how people remember him?”
“I’m sure going to try. No man’s life should be defined solely by his death, particularly a man like James. Don’t you want to help me preserve his legacy?”
He didn’t answer. He picked up his newspaper and tossed a five-dollar tip on the table. He paid his bill, grabbed his second order from the cashier and went out the door, letting it slam noisily behind him.
He’d parked his truck across the street. He walked to it and opened the passenger door. As he did every Saturday morning, he unwrapped the extra bacon and eggs and spread them on the paper sack for Sallie. He didn’t have to look back to know the annoying woman was watching him out the front window of the grill.
Help her preserve the legacy of James Hayes? Now, that was a laugh. He didn’t want to preserve that legacy. He’d spent the past six years trying to destroy it.
CHAPTER THREE
Chattanooga, Tennessee
“THAT NOSY WOMAN’S going to ruin everything.”
George Conner stopped his frantic pacing to look for the cigarettes he’d carried for fifty of his seventy-three years, desperate for something to calm his nerves. The phone call from his stepson had rattled him. Kathryn Morgan. In Alabama. Asking questions. Heaven help them!
He patted his shirt pocket. Belatedly he realized he didn’t have any cigarettes. Marianne had forced him to give them up last year, along with everything else that made life worthwhile. Cigarettes. Booze. Red meat. She even regulated their lovemaking, if you could call what they did lovemaking.
He’d probably live longer, but what for? When a man gave up his pleasures, he might as well be dead. And if that Morgan woman uncovered his lies and he was headed for prison, he preferred to go with a cigarette in his mouth, his pants down and a shot of Jack Daniel’s in his glass.
He flipped open the wooden box on the bar, taking out one of the hand-rolled cigars he kept for friends whose wives weren’t as dictatorial as his own. He held the cigar under his nose and savored the smell. Marianne watched him without comment until he put it in his mouth, then said in that maddening voice she used when she wanted to scold but didn’t want to sound like she was scolding, “I know you’re not seriously considering lighting that.”
He hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t smoke cigars yet barely able to resist now that he’d gotten a taste for them. But then Marianne raised one eyebrow and that small gesture decided the issue. Mumbling a curse under his breath, George tossed the cigar on the bar, not as fearful of having another heart attack as being on the receiving end of Marianne’s wrath for the rest of the day.
He walked to the table where she sat, where she always sat, by the wall of windows that offered a spectacular view of the city far below. This room was her sanctuary in a dark monstrosity of stone, parapets and turrets that jutted obscenely above the trees at the top of Lookout Mountain and had earned the ire of the good citizens of Chattanooga. The Castle, most people called the house, although there’d been other less-flattering names over the years. The Dungeon. Hayes’s Folly.
Marianne hated it as much as everyone else. She had hated it every day of the nearly twenty years they had lived here, but no one other than George would ever know that. James had built the house for her as an expression of love. So she’d never move. That was an issue they had argued and settled a long time ago.
“Darling, sit down and I’ll have Agnes bring you some freshly squeezed juice,” she told him, taking a sip from her own glass. But he was too nervous to sit. He stood gazing out the window with his hands deep in the pockets of his polyester slacks, absentmindedly rattling his keys—and apparently Marianne’s patience—until she’d finally had enough.
“George, please,” she said shortly, drawing his attention. “He said he could handle her and he will. Now come sit down and relax.”
Relax? Not likely. She, on the other hand, looked as if she didn’t have a care. The undisputed favorite in her menagerie of animals had jumped into her lap, and she sat rubbing the old cat with unhurried strokes, pausing to scratch under its neck and feed it a treat from the bowl on the table. They were a matched pair, with their silver-white hair and startling blue eyes. They even had the same expression of cool disinterest.
“That woman is probably worming her way into your son’s house right now, and you’re entertaining the cat,” he told her.
Marianne put the animal on the floor and casually brushed the hairs from her lap. “What do you propose I do?”
“Go down there.”
“That’s unnecessary, I think. She’s probably already gone.”
“And if she’s not? If, in her snooping, she somehow uncovers what I did…”
“She won’t.”
“But he might tell her. Have you considered that?”
Anger flashed in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’d never do anything to hurt his family.”
“Not consciously but—”
“Not ever! He’d never betray us, so stop this nonsense and get hold of yourself.”
George blew out a breath in exasperation. Arguing with her wouldn’t do any good. Marianne had always been blind when it came to the children. Bret’s jealousy of his brother was nothing more than sibling rivalry in her eyes. And James had been unhappy for months before Marianne could admit he’d become disenchanted with the success he had worked so hard to achieve.
Even Ellen, the child they shared, was perfect. Marianne refused to see that their daughter’s repeated relationships with men who abused her were a form of self-imposed punishment.
“Fine, M. You sit here with your head in the sand and wait for everything to fall apart,” he said, walking to the door and jerking it open, “but don’t ask me to.”
“Where are you going?”
“The country club.”
“But Agnes will have lunch ready in a few minutes.”
“I plan to drink my lunch.”
“George Conner, don’t you dare,” she called after him, but George had already decided he damn well did dare and kept walking, not bothering to respond.
WHEN THE ELECTRIC GATE at the end of the yard clanged shut and she could no longer hear her husband’s car winding down the narrow mountain road, Marianne allowed herself to give in to the fear she’d hidden from him.
She’d fought numerous threats from unscrupulous writers over the years, writers whose half-truths and lies about James has caused more pain than any family should have to endure. But this biographer, Kathryn Morgan, had a reputation for honesty and integrity, for uncovering the truth. And that made her more dangerous than all the others combined.
If this woman looked deeply into their finances, saw how they’d used the money from James’s estate and the several million in royalties his music continued to produce each year, she could become suspicious. But was she smart enough to figure out what they’d done? And why?
Unsure, Marianne went to her desk in the study, unlocked the bottom drawer and removed the thick file she’d commissioned more than a year ago on Kathryn Morgan. The folder’s front cover had a photograph attached, but she only glanced at it. What interested Marianne were the newspaper clippings, the stories the woman had written as an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Reading everything took nearly an hour. Finishing the last article, she closed the file with a trembling hand and sat back in her chair to consider what she must do. She’d gotten them into this mess. The responsibility fell on her shoulders to get them out of it. But how?
She had hoped strongly worded letters from her attorney and the refusal of requests for interviews would discourage the biographer from writing this book, or at least from digging deep enough into their past to reveal their complicity.
But no, this woman was not so easily dissuaded. She had been a gifted child, and gifted children became gifted adults. By forgetting that, Marianne had committed a grievous error and put everyone in jeopardy.
A memory from long ago came to her: the old house on Tennessee Avenue and the secondhand piano with its yellowing keys that had occupied a corner of the den. In the memory, Jamie was only three or four and sat on the stool at the piano, his legs still too short to reach the pedals.
He couldn’t yet read, but he was already composing. He played for hours every day, determined that the music coming from the keys would match the music he heard in his head. That intensity, that obsessive need to perform perfectly, had been difficult for her and David to watch in their young son.
As Jamie grew older, his obsession for music and his need to perfect it hadn’t lessened. He’d quickly mastered several instruments and by the time he turned fifteen was composing music that would make him famous.
This writer was equally talented, and although it was with words and not music, she possessed a similar intensity and obsessive need to finish what she started. She wouldn’t quit like the others.
Marianne returned the file to the drawer and took out the small black-and-white snapshot she also kept there. The photograph was creased, slightly out of focus and more than twenty-five years old, but she treasured it for the bittersweet feeling it always gave her when she looked at it.
“Say, ‘Weasels want weenies on Wednesday,”’ David had told the boys just before she’d snapped their picture, sending them into a fit of giggles. At the time, she hadn’t known it would be the last photograph of the three of them together.
Less than two weeks later a car had struck and killed David as he crossed the street in front of the foundry where he worked. Jamie had been ten and Bret five. She’d struggled financially and emotionally to raise them alone until George Conner had given her a job as a receptionist in his dental office and married her a few months later.
Loud knocking on the door of the study and their housekeeper’s voice jolted Marianne out of the past and into the present. “Mrs. Conner, lunch is ready, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Agnes. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She put the photograph back and started to close the drawer, but David’s face drew her gaze again. Dear sweet David who had thought her flawless and had vowed to love her always. He’d never have believed her capable of such deceit.
“What would you think of me now,” she whispered to his image, “if you knew I sacrificed one of our sons to save the other?”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SMELL WAS the first thing Kate noticed—manure and urine, mixed with other odors of the animals penned in the large metal building. She’d never been to a horse sale before, had never touched a horse until yesterday, when Hayes had jerked her rudely down from the limb of that tree and onto the back of one.
This place was full of horses, and they could be looked at, stroked, even ridden if she cared to do so. She didn’t. She wasn’t that brave. Or crazy. But before she left tonight, she intended to at least rub one to see what it felt like. That she was brave enough to do.
Glancing around, she suspected right away that she’d chosen the wrong thing to wear. The pristine white slacks and top were cool but impractical for the dirty barn. They made her stand out like a beacon in a sea of denim, boots and western shirts.
She had taken extra care with her makeup and pulled her hair into a practical yet flattering French braid, but here, cowboy hats seemed mandatory, even for the women, and the most popular hairstyle was no style at all. She hadn’t felt this out of place in years.
She shrugged off her self-consciousness, having learned a long time ago that worrying about being different was even worse than being different. People can’t hurt you unless you give them the power to hurt you. Wise words from a wise man. She had listened and remembered.
She sidestepped a pile of manure covered with thousands of tiny flies and wished she hadn’t worn open-toed shoes. Wood shavings inadequately covered the dirt floor, which was littered with empty popcorn boxes, cigarette butts and peanut hulls. More than once she’d watched someone spit tobacco juice.
The place was awful. Why would anyone willingly come here? But they did. Hundreds of them. The crowd was so large near the main entrance Kate could barely move. And then she saw what had attracted everyone: along one wall were tables where vendors sold hand-tooled belts, buckles, hats and clothing.
Twenty minutes remained until the horse sale began, so she eased through the crowd and walked up and down the aisles admiring the horses, separated from them by the flimsiest of metal fencing. Their bodies glistened with sweat from the heat, which large exhaust fans at each end of the building couldn’t remove. The air hung hot and heavy with moisture, and the rumble of thunder could be heard over the country songs playing over the public-address system.
She spotted her quarry the same moment he spotted her. Bret Hayes stood at one of the pens talking with two men. His expression instantly turned hard. He said something to the men and stalked toward her.
“Come with me,” he said, roughly grabbing her elbow.
“I don’t think I want to.”
“Too bad.”
She struggled, but it didn’t do any good. He out-weighed her by at least seventy-five pounds and had arms of steel. As he dragged her from the building into the dark night, her brother’s warning to be careful echoed in her head. For once she wished she’d listened to him.
“WERE YOU PUT on this earth to drive me insane?”
In the quiet of the parking lot Bret’s voice came out at a deafening level. He couldn’t believe this annoying woman had tracked him down again. The Saturday night horse sale was one of the few pleasures he had in his life, and he wasn’t about to allow Kathryn Morgan to ruin it like she’d ruined his breakfast.
She stood at the side of his truck and horse trailer. Bret paced the dirt in front of her, afraid that if he stopped moving he might be tempted to put his hands around that pretty throat and squeeze.
How had this one tiny woman been able to plunge him into a living hell in less than forty-eight hours? She’d shot holes in what he’d come to think of as a comfortable, if not perfect, life. Like grit, her abrasive personality rubbed him raw.
He’d bitten back what he wanted to say until he got her away from the crowded barn. But now, at the far end of the dirt lot where the curious couldn’t hear them, Bret released his pent-up anger. He stopped abruptly in front of her and leaned down until their faces were inches apart.
“What did you think you were doing, following me here? Don’t you have any respect for a person’s privacy? I’ve told you over and over again to leave me alone and you don’t listen.”
“I wanted to see what a horse sale was like.”
“The hell you did.”
“I did!”
“You expect me to believe you had no idea I was going to be here?”
“Well…”
“I thought so.”
A zigzag of lightning pierced the dark sky, and thunder lumbered across the hills. A few large drops of rain peppered the vehicles and the ground. When the rising wind threatened to whisk away his cowboy hat, Bret reached up with one hand and held it in place.
“What gives you the right to mess with my life? Do you know what you remind me of? That character in the cartoon that whirls around like a tornado and chews up everything in its path. You eat people alive before they even know what hit them.”
“That’s not fair! I’m not like that.”
“Yeah, you are. Ever since you whirled into town, you’ve done everything in your power to make me miserable. Do you think I don’t know you’ve been running around all day asking questions about me, bothering my friends and trying to trick them into telling you something juicy you could use in your book?”
“Your friends? I’ve got news for you, Hayes. You’re grossly lacking in the friends department. I couldn’t find ten people in this town who could even recall talking to you, much less counting you as a friend.” She poked him in the chest. “And it’s pretty obvious why. You’ve got a personality problem only electric shock could fix.”
Bret gave her an incredulous look. “You think I’ve got a personality problem? Well, lady, let me tell you something. You’re the most irritating unlikable person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. You’re annoying. You’re devious. Your mouth stays open so much I’m surprised something hasn’t nested in it by now. You’ve trespassed on my property, ruined my breakfast, followed me around with no purpose but to harass me. You’ve turned my life into a nightmare. And I’ve had enough!”
Thunder cracked loudly overhead and the rain that had threatened for days finally began to fall in earnest; it came down in torrents to soak the thirsty ground and sent steam rising with a hiss from the hot metal of the trucks and trailers. The dirt parking lot became a swamp in a matter of seconds.
The woman lifted her hands in a gesture of frustration. “Why am I standing here listening to this?”
She stomped off muttering loudly to herself, but she hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she slipped and went down in a puddle. The sight of her sprawled on the ground in those white clothes did a great deal to improve Bret’s bad mood. He laughed.
She crawled back up, flinging mud from both hands, cursing because she’d also broken the heel of her shoe. His amusement deepened her anger, and she turned and threw the shoe at him, missing. She took off the other shoe and threw that, but it missed, as well, making him laugh harder.
“You have lousy aim, Morgan.”
She whirled and squished off in the mud. He watched with a satisfied smile as she climbed into her car, cranked it and tried to move, burying her wheels in the slush. The lot was for pickups and trailers with heavy tires, not fancy rental cars.
Bret grabbed his slicker from the truck and exchanged his hat for a baseball cap that the rain couldn’t ruin. He leaned against the door, folded his arms over his chest and waited for her to ask for help. He was going to enjoy telling her no. She could get a ride from someone else. He wasn’t giving her one.
When she didn’t get out, he went over and tapped on the window. She opened it slightly and he leaned down and looked in. For once he had the upper hand with this woman, and he intended to take full advantage of it.
