Читать книгу Fortune's Woman / A Fortune Wedding - Kristin Hardy - Страница 11

Four hours and counting.

From his perch in an empty detective’s chair, Ross looked at the clock above the chief’s glass-walled office in the Red Rock police station.

He couldn’t think the long delay boded well for Frannie. It was now nearly half past midnight and she had been in an interrogation room for hours.

His poor sister. Eighteen years of marriage to Lloyd Fredericks had just about wrung every drop of spirit out of her. She must be sick over this ordeal.

What could be taking so long? Frannie should have been released hours ago. With every tick of the clock, his hopes for a quick resolution trickled a little further away.

When the police chief emerged from the hallway that housed the interview room and headed for his office, Ross rose quickly and intercepted him.

“What’s going on, Jimmy? I need info here.”

His friend gave him a long, solemn look and Ross’s stomach suddenly clenched with nerves. He did not like the implications of that look.

“She’s going to be charged, Ross. We have no choice.”

He stared at the other man, not willing yet to accept the unthinkable. “Charged with what?”

The chief rolled his eyes. “With jaywalking. Lord, Ross, what the hell do you think, with what. With murder!”

This couldn’t be happening. Ross balled his fists. “That’s bull! This whole thing is bull and you know it! Frannie no more killed Lloyd than I did.”

“Are you confessing?”

“I’ve thought about killing the bastard a thousand times,” he answered the chief. “Does that count?”

“Sorry, but if we could prosecute thoughts, I doubt there would be anybody left outside the walls of my jail.”

“What evidence can you possibly have against Frannie that’s not circumstantial?” he asked.

The police chief just shook his head. “You know I can’t talk about that, Ross, especially not with the suspect’s own brother, even if he is an ex-cop and an old friend. Even if you weren’t Frannie’s brother, I couldn’t tell you anything.”

“Come on, throw me a little bone here. It’s only been four hours since Lloyd’s death. Why the big rush? You haven’t even had time to look at any other possibilities! What about Crystal Rivers? She claimed she just stumbled onto the body and found Frannie there, but she doesn’t exactly seem like the most upright, stalwart citizen of Red Rock. For all we know, she could have killed him, then waited around for somebody else to find him before circling back and throwing her big drama queen scene.”

Jimmy was quiet for a moment, then he motioned toward his office. They walked in, and he shut the door and closed the louvered blinds to conceal their conversation from any other curious eyes that might be watching in the station house.

“Look, I don’t know if this is my place, but you and I have been around the block together a few times, from our days at the academy together to our time in the same division in San Antonio. I respect you more than just about any detective on my force and you know I’d hire you here in an instant if you ever decided to come back to the job.”

“I appreciate that. Just be straight with me, Jimmy.”

“I’ll just remind you who calls the shots around here when it comes to prosecutions. Bruce Gibson. That’s not helping the situation for Frannie, especially when she’s refusing to say anything about what happened.”

Ross gazed at the other man as the implications sunk in. Bruce Gibson was the district attorney—and a particularly vindictive one at that. He was the one who chose when charges would be filed and what those charges would entail. Even if the police department wanted to pursue other leads, a district attorney could make the final choice about whether they had enough evidence to go forward with a prosecution.

And he had been one of Lloyd’s closest friends, Ross suddenly remembered, had practically grown up at the Frederickses’ mansion.

Gibson would be out for blood—and it would be a bonus to the man if he could extract a little of that blood from the Fortunes. Gibson had made no secret of the fact that he thought the Fortunes were too wealthy, too powerful. He was up for a tough re-election battle in the fall and from all appearances, he seemed to be making an issue of the fact that he considered himself a man of the people and wouldn’t let somebody’s social status sway prosecutorial decisions.

Added to that, there was no love lost between Ross and Bruce Gibson. Just a few weeks earlier, he and Ross had exchanged words over an incident involving a stable fire on the family ranch and the way the family was choosing to investigate it privately.

What a tangled mess. Any other district attorney would see how ludicrous this whole thing was.

“Can I see her?” he asked.

Caldwell gave him a long, appraising look, then finally nodded. “It’s past normal visiting hours but we can make an exception in this case. It might take a few moments, though. She’s in central booking.”

Perhaps half an hour later, Ross was finally ushered by the young, fresh-faced police officer he had seen earlier on the murder scene to a stark white interview room. Frannie looked up when the door opened and Ross had to stop from clenching his fists again at the sight of her in a prison-orange jumpsuit.

Since his sister’s ill-fated marriage to Fredericks years ago, he had seen her disheartened and hurt, he had seen her hopeless and bleak. But he didn’t think he had ever seen her look so desperately afraid.

The chair scraped as he pulled it out to sit down and she flinched a little at the noise.

“Hey, Frannie-Banannie.”

Her eyes filled up with tears at the childish nickname. “You haven’t called me that in years.”

He was suddenly sorry for that, sorry that while he had never completely withdrawn from his family, he had enjoyed the distance that came from living twenty miles away in San Antonio. He didn’t have to be involved in the day-to-day drama of family affairs, didn’t have to watch Frannie slowly become this washed-out version of herself.

“How are you doing, sis?”

She shrugged. “I guess you know they’re charging me.”

“Yeah. Jim told me. Sounds like Bruce Gibson is on the warpath.”

Her mouth tightened but she only looked down at her hands.

“What happened, Frannie?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s what I hear. But you told them you didn’t do it, right?”

She didn’t answer him. Instead she rubbed the fraying sleeve of the jumpsuit between her thumb and forefinger. “How’s Josh?” she asked.

He sighed at her evasive tactic but decided to let it go for now. “He’s fine. I sent him back to your house.”

“He shouldn’t be alone right now. Is someone with him?”

“Julie Osterman is with him.”

“Julie? From the Foundation? Why?”

Because I didn’t want to ask the family to bail us all out once again, he thought but could never say. “She was with me when…everything happened. I couldn’t be in two places at once and I needed help and Julie seemed a good choice since she’s a youth counselor and all, like Susan.”

“Julie is nice.”

Frannie sounded exhausted suddenly, emotionally and physically, and he wanted to gather her up and take care of her.

Those days were gone, though. Try as he might, he couldn’t fix everything. He couldn’t fix her marriage for the last eighteen years. He couldn’t get his young, happy sister back. And he wasn’t at all sure he could extricate her from this mess, though he sure as hell was going to try.

“Ross, I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything. Whatever you need.”

“Take care of Josh for me. Stay with him at the house. I know he’s almost eighteen and almost an adult and will probably tell you he doesn’t need anyone else but I don’t want him on his own right now. Help him through this, okay? He’s going to need you.”

“Come on, Frannie. Don’t worry. You’ll be out before we know it and this will all be a memory.”

“Just help him. You’ve always been far more of a father to him than…than Lloyd.”

“You don’t even need to ask, Fran. Of course I will.”

“Thank you.” She attempted such a forlorn smile it just about broke his heart. “I can always count on you.”

If that were true, she wouldn’t be in this calamity. She wouldn’t have been married to Lloyd in the first place and she wouldn’t be facing murder charges right now, if he had been able to rescue her from the situation years ago, like he’d wanted to.

“We’ll get the best attorney we can find for you, okay? Just hang in.”

She nodded, though it looked as if it took the last of her energy just to make that small gesture. He had a feeling in another minute, his baby sister was going to fold her arms on the interrogation room table, lay her head down and fall instantly asleep.

“Get some rest, okay?” he advised her. “Everything will seem better in the morning, I promise.”

She managed another nod. Ross glanced at the officer who was monitoring the visit, then thought, to hell with this. He pulled his sister into his arms, noting not for the first time that she seemed as fragile and insubstantial as a stained-glass window.

“Thanks, Ross,” she mumbled before the guard pulled her away and led her from the room.

The Spring Fling seemed another lifetime ago as Ross drove the streets of Red Rock toward the house where Frannie and Lloyd moved shortly after their marriage.

The security guard at the entrance to their exclusive gated community knew him. His fleshy features turned avid the moment Ross rolled down his window.

“Mr. Fortune. I guess you’re here to stay with your sister’s boy, huh? You been to the jail to see her?”

The news was probably spreading through town like stink in springtime. “Yeah. Can you let me in?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he said, though he made no move to raise the security arm. “Jail is just no place for a nice lady like Mrs. F. Why, you could have knocked me six ways to Sunday when my cousin Lou called to tell me what had happened at the Spring Fling. Too bad I was here working and missed everything.”

Ross gestured to the gate. “Can you let me in, George? I really need to be with my nephew right now.”

The guard hit the button with a disappointed kind of look.

“You tell Mrs. F. I’m thinking about her, okay?”

“I’ll be sure to do that, George. Thanks.”

He quickly rolled his window up and drove through the gate before George decided he wanted to chat a little more.

Lights blazed from every single window of the grand pink stucco McMansion he had always secretly thought of as a big, gaudy wedding cake. There was no trace of his sister’s elegant good taste in the house. It was as if Lloyd had stamped out any trace of Frannie.

The interior of the house wasn’t any more welcoming. It was cold and formal, white on white with gold accents.

Ross knew of two rooms in the house with a little personality. Josh’s bedroom was a typical teenager’s room with posters on the wall and clutter and mementos covering every surface.

The other was Frannie’s small sitting room that hinted at the little sister he remembered. It was brightly decorated, with local handiworks, vivid textiles and many of Frannie’s own photographs on the wall.

Lloyd had a habit of changing the security system all the time so Ross didn’t even try to open the door. He rang the doorbell and a moment later, Julie Osterman opened the door, her soft, pretty features looking about as exhausted as Frannie’s had been.

“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said. “I never expected things to take this long, that I would have to impose on you until the early hours of the morning.”

“No problem.” She held the door open for him and he moved past her into the formal foyer. “Josh tried to send me home and insisted he would be okay on his own, but I just didn’t feel right about leaving him here alone, under the circumstances.”

“I appreciate that.”

“He’s in the kitchen on the telephone to a friend.”

“At this hour? Is it Lyndsey?”

Josh’s young girlfriend had been a source of conflict between Josh and his parents, for reasons Ross didn’t quite understand.

“I think so, but I can’t be certain. I was trying not to eavesdrop.”

“How is he?”

She frowned a little as she appeared to give his question serious consideration. Despite his own fatigue, Ross couldn’t help noticing the way her mouth pursed a little when she was concentrating, and he had a wild urge to kiss away every line.

He definitely needed sleep if he was harboring inappropriate fantasies about a prickly busybody type like Julie Osterman.

“I can’t really tell, to be honest with you,” she answered. “I get the impression he’s more upset about his mother being detained at the police station than he seems to be about his father’s death. Or at least that appears to be where he’s focusing his emotions right now. On the other hand, his reaction could just be displacement.”

“Want to skip the mumbo jumbo?”

She made a face. “Sorry. I just meant maybe he’s not ready—or doesn’t want—to face the reality of his father’s death right now, so it’s easier to place his energy and emotion on his mother’s situation.”

“Or maybe he just happens to be more upset about Frannie than he is about Lloyd. The two of them didn’t exactly get along.”

“So I hear,” she answered. “It sounds as if few people did get along with Lloyd Fredericks, besides Crystal and her sort.”

“And there were plenty of those.”

Her mouth tightened but she refrained from commenting on his bitterness. Lloyd’s frequent affairs had been a great source of humiliation for Frannie. “How is your sister?” she asked instead.

“Holding up okay, under the circumstances.”

“Do you expect them to keep her overnight for questioning, then?”

He sighed, angry all over again at the most recent turn of events. “Not for questioning. For arraignment. She’s being charged.”

Her eyes widened with astonishment, then quickly filled with compassion. “Oh, poor Josh. This is going to be so hard on him.”

“Yeah, it’s a hell of a mess,” he answered heavily. “So it looks like I’ll be staying here for a while, until we can sort things out.”

She touched him, just a quick, almost furtive brush of her hand on his arm, much as she had touched Josh earlier. Through his cotton shirt, he could feel the warmth of her skin and he was astonished at the urge to wrap his arms around her and pull her close and just lean on her for a moment.

“I’m so sorry, Ross.”

He cleared his throat and told himself he was nothing but relieved when she pulled her hand away.

“Thanks again for everything you did tonight,” he said. “I would have been in a real fix without you.”

“I’m glad I could help in some small way.”

She smiled gently and he was astonished at how that simple warm expression could ease the tightness in his chest enough that he could breathe just a little easier.

“It’s late,” she finally said. “Or early, I guess. I’d better go.”

“Oh right. I’m sorry again you had to be here so long.”

“I’d like to say goodbye to Josh before I leave, if it’s all right with you,” she said.

“Of course,” he answered and followed her into the kitchen.

In his fantasy childhood, the kitchen was always the warmest room in the house, a place scattered with children’s backpacks and clumsy art work on the refrigerator and homemade cookies cooling on a rack on the countertop.

He hadn’t known anything like that, except at the occasional friend’s house. To his regret, Frannie’s kitchen wasn’t anything like that image, either. It was as cool and formal as the rest of the house—white cabinets, white tile, stainlesssteel appliances. It was like some kind of hospital lab rather than the center of a house.

Josh sat on a white bar stool, his cell phone up to his ear.

“I told you, Lyns,” he was saying, “I don’t have any more information than I did when we talked an hour ago. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything, okay? Meantime, you have to get some rest. You know what—”

Ross wasn’t sure what alerted the boy to their presence but before he could complete the sentence, he suddenly swiveled around to face them. Ross was almost certain he saw secrets flash in his nephew’s eyes before his expression turned guarded again.

“Um, I’ve got to go, Lyns,” he mumbled into the phone. “My uncle Ross just got here. Yeah. I’ll call you later.”

He ended the call, folded his phone and slid it into his pocket before he uncoiled his lanky frame from the chair.

“How’s my mom? Is she with you?”

Ross sighed. “No. I’m sorry.”

“How long can they hold her?”

“For now, as long as they want. She’s being charged.”

His features suffused with color. “Charged? With murder?”

Ross nodded, wishing he had other news to offer his nephew.

“This completely sucks.”

That was one word for it, he supposed. A pretty accurate one. “Yeah, it does. But there’s nothing we can do about it tonight. Meanwhile, Ms. Osterman needs to get on back to her house. She came in to tell you goodbye.”

He was proud of the boy for reining in most of his outrage in order to be polite to Julie.

“Thank you for giving me a ride and staying here and everything,” Josh said to her. “And even though I told you I didn’t need you to stay so late, it was…nice not to be here by myself and all.”

“You’re very welcome.” She smiled with that gentle warmth she just seemed to exude, paused for just a moment, then stepped forward and hugged the boy, who was a good six inches taller than she was.

“Call me if you need to talk, okay?” she said softly.

“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, though Ross was pretty sure Josh looked touched by her concern.

They both walked her to the door and watched her climb into her car. When she drove away, Ross shut the door to Frannie’s wedding-cake house and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do next.

He would just have to figure it out, he supposed.

He didn’t have any other choice.

This was just about the last place on earth he wanted to be right now.

In fact, given a choice between attending his despised brother-in-law’s funeral and wading chest-deep in a manure pit out on the Double Crown, Ross figured he would much rather be standing in cow honey swatting flies away from his face than sitting here in this discreetly decorated funeral home, surrounded by the cloying smell of lilies and carnations and listening to all the weeping and wailing going on over a man most people in town had disliked.

It would be over soon. Already, the eulogies seemed to be dwindling. He could only feel relief. This all seemed the height of hypocrisy. He knew of at least a dozen people here who had openly told him at separate times over the last few days how much they had hated Lloyd. Yet here they were with their funeral game faces, all solemn and sad-eyed.

He glanced over at his nephew, who seemed to be watching the entire proceedings with an odd detachment, as if it was all some kind of mildly interesting play that had no direct bearing in his life.

Josh seemed to be holding up well under the strain of the last five days. Maybe too well. The boy’s only intense emotion over anything seemed to be rage at the prosecuting attorney for moving ahead with charges against his mother.

It had been a hellish five days, culminating in this farce. First had come the medical examiner’s report read at Frannie’s arraignment that Lloyd had been killed with a blunt instrument whose general size and heft matched the large piece of pottery his sister had purchased shortly before the murder. Then reports had begun to trickle out that the heavy vase had several sets of unidentified fingerprints on it—and one very obvious identified set that belonged to his sister.

Added to Crystal’s testimony that Lloyd had a heated phone call with Frannie shortly before the murder, things weren’t looking good for his sister.

A good attorney with the typical cooperative client might have been able to successfully argue that Frannie’s fingerprints would naturally be on the vase since she had purchased it just a short time earlier, and that a hearsay one-sided telephone exchange—no matter how heated—was not proof of murder.

But Frannie was not the typical cooperative client. Despite the high stakes, she refused to confirm or deny her involvement in Lloyd’s murder and had chosen instead to remain mum about the entire evening, even to her attorney.

Ross didn’t know what the hell she was doing. He had visited twice more since the night of the murder in an effort to convince her to just tell him and the Red Rock police what had happened, but she had shut him out, too. Each time, he had ended up leaving more frustrated than ever.

As a result of her baffling, completely unexpected obstinacy, she had been charged with second-degree murder and bound over for trial. Even more aggravating, she had been denied bail. Bruce Gibson had argued in court that Frannie was a flight risk because of her wealthy family.

He apparently was laboring under two huge misconceptions: one, that Frannie would ever have it in her to run off and abandon her son and, two, that any of the Fortunes would willingly help her escape, no matter how much they might want to.

In the bail hearing, Bruce had been full of impassioned arguments about the Fortune wealth and power, the entire time with that smirk on his plastic features that Ross wanted to pound off of him.

The judge had apparently been gullible enough to buy into the myth—either that or he was another old golfing buddy of Lloyd’s or his father, Cordell. Judge Wilkinson had agreed with Bruce and ordered Frannie held without bail, so now his delicate, fragile sister sat moldering in the county jail, awaiting trial on trumped-up charges that should never have been filed.

And while she was stuck there, he was forced to sit on this rickety little excuse for a chair, listening to a pack of lies about what a great guy Lloyd had been.

Ross didn’t buy any of it. He had disliked the man from the day he married Frannie, when she was only eighteen. Even though she had tried to put on a bright face and play the role of a regular bride, Ross had sensed something in her eyes even then that seemed to indicate she wasn’t thrilled about the marriage.

He had tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen to him, probably because Cindy had pushed so hard for the marriage.

When Josh showed up several weeks shy of nine months later, Ross had put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured Lloyd had gotten her pregnant. Frannie was just the sort to try doing what she thought was the right thing for her child, even if it absolutely wasn’t the right decision for her.

In the years since, he had watched her change from a luminous, vivacious girl to a quiet, subdued society matron. She always wore the right thing, said the right thing, but every ounce of joy seemed to have been sucked out of her.

And all because of Lloyd Fredericks, the man who apparently was heading for sainthood any day now, judging by the glowing eulogies delivered at his memorial service.

Ross wondered what all these fusty types would do if he stood up and spoke the truth, that Lloyd was just about the lousiest excuse for a human being he’d ever met—which was really quite a distinction, considering that as an ex-cop, he’d met more than his share.

In his experience, Lloyd was manipulative and dishonest. He cheated, he lied, he stole and, worse, he bullied anybody he considered weaker than himself.

Ross couldn’t say any of that, though. He could only sit here and wait until this whole damn thing was over and he could take Josh home.

He glanced around at the crowd, wondering again at the most notable absence—next to Frannie’s, of course. Cindy had opted not to come, and he couldn’t help wondering where she might be. He would have expected his mother to be sitting right up there on the front row with Lloyd’s parents. She loved nothing more than to be the center of attention, and what better place for that than at her son-in-law’s memorial service, with all its drama and high emotion?

Cindy had adored her son-in-law, though Ross thought perhaps he’d seen hints that their relationship had cooled, since right around the time Cindy had been injured in a mysterious car accident.

Still, even if she and Lloyd had been openly feuding, which they weren’t, he would have thought Cindy would come.

He was still wondering at her absence when the pastor finally wrapped things up a few moments later. With the autopsy completed, Lloyd’s parents had elected to cremate his remains, so there would be no interment ceremony.

“Can we go now?” Josh asked him when other people started to file out of the funeral chapel.

Ross would have preferred nothing more than to hustle Josh away from all this artificiality. He knew people likely wanted to pay their respects to Lloyd’s son, but he wasn’t about to force the kid to stay if he didn’t want to be there.

“Your call,” he said.

“Let’s go, then,” Josh said. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

As he had expected, at least a dozen people stopped them on their way to the door to wish Josh their condolences. Ross was immensely proud of his nephew for the quiet dignity with which he thanked them each for their sympathy without giving away his own feelings about his father.

They were almost to the door when Ross saw with dismay that Lloyd’s mother, Jillian, was heading in their direction. Her Botox-smooth features looked ravaged just now, her eyes red and weepy. Still, fury seemed to push away the grief for now.

“How dare you show your face here!” she hissed to Ross when she was still several feet away.