Читать книгу Hidden Legacy - Margaret Way - Страница 8

SHAFTS OF LATE-AFTERNOON sunlight pierced the high arched windows of Alyssa Sutherland’s studio, turning the huge panes of glass into sheets of liquid copper. Inside the studio, it was as if someone had switched on dozens of electric lights. Caught in the golden illuminance was a large open area with white painted walls, dark, rough-hewn ceiling beams and dark-stained timber columns that supported the soaring ceiling. Visitors to the studio often expressed the opinion that it was more like a country antique shop than a workplace, for the room was filled almost to overflowing with all manner of beautiful and valuable objects, often used as props in Alyssa’s paintings. As a centerpiece stood an easel, with a half-finished canvas on it. The artist was at work, her blond head suffused by the sun’s radiance.

It took a few moments for the dazzling incandescence to pass by the windows, leaving the delicate, dusky mauve that heralded the brief twilight of the sub-tropics. Alyssa broke off with a sigh, placing her paintbrush in an earthenware pot of solvent, then wiping her fingers on her paint-spattered smock. She had lost all notion of time but a glance at the wall clock told her she’d been working all afternoon without a break, stopping now and then to stare at the painting—a still life of bread, wine and fruit in a Ming dynasty bowl—to see how things were progressing.

No magic there today. She doubted a good night’s sleep would help much, either—if she could even subdue her jangled feelings long enough to sink into oblivion. Despite the exquisite strains of Bach’s A Minor violin concerto blossoming out of one corner of the studio, her head was seething with angry words.

A serious relationship had been brought to a bruising end. Brett had packed up his possessions and left the house they’d settled into barely a year before. Only a year—that was how long their relationship had survived the initial pleasures of being together before taking the downward slope into the stresses and strains of two very different people trying to live in harmony.

Alyssa saw it as Brett’s relentless drive to back her into a corner. From the day he’d moved in, he had begun to assert an urge to dominate. That diminished her sense of guilt about the split-up. She believed in equality, but Brett had been more interested in exerting control. She’d finally had enough and found the courage to say so. What she’d often heard was painfully true—you had to live with someone to even begin to know that person…and maybe not even then.

Troubled in mind and spirit, Alyssa turned away to pour herself a cup of coffee. She knew she drank too much of it, but late at night when she was working, the caffeine kept her awake and her senses razor-sharp. Coffee in hand, she settled into a leather armchair, leaning her head against the plush upholstery, her mind returning to that final scene…

IT ALL BEGAN innocuously enough, as major upsets often do. One minute she and Brett were sitting on the deck finishing the steak and salad dinner she’d prepared for them, the next, something he said—something she found jarringly mean-spirited—triggered a powerful reaction in her. The straw that broke the camel’s back, as she now thought of it. In the preceding months she’d usually shut up at such provocative moments. Anything for peace although she realized now, with a pang of self-disgust, they hadn’t been her finest moments. But on that occasion she’d sprung up from her chair, distraught tears in her eyes.

Let it out, Alyssa! You can’t stand it anymore!

Her intense response had nothing to do with the topic at hand; it had everything to do with her growing feelings of repression. “I can’t be with you anymore, Brett! You…you damage my psyche.” That was the way she’d come to think of it. How had Brett Harris turned from the man who claimed to love and admire her unreservedly, into a partner determined on controlling her? And in such a short time? It was a side of him she’d never seen, let alone imagined.

That evening he, too, had jumped up, apparently as ready to engage in a major confrontation as she was. His action had toppled a beautiful long-stemmed crystal wineglass that predictably broke, breaking up a valuable set of six. Strangely enough, when she’d decided to use those particular glasses she had a presentiment one of them might break.

Brett cursed his clumsiness, sucked at a tiny cut on his hand, but ignored the dark-crimson wine stain that spread over the white cloth. “Damage your psyche?”

He had developed an irritating habit of repeating her words as though he found them incomprehensible. “What sort of mumbo jumbo is that?” He followed her into the house, a whipcord-lean young man just short of six feet, dark-haired, with hypnotic dark eyes and handsome if rather hawklike features. His hands, not as attractive as his face, clutched the back of the sofa. His dark eyes glittered with contained contempt. “You can’t mean that, Ally?”

“I do!” Her voice sounded stricken. “These last six months have been awful. It’s truly the end for us.”

His response was to take her forcibly her by the shoulders. Alyssa considered any sort of violence, especially violence toward women and children, totally reprehensible. She had often had occasion to express her views, working pro bono for a women’s refuge during her short career as a lawyer. He was well aware where she stood on domestic violence. “Every time you come back from visiting that bloody woman, you’re different,” he accused, his face tight. “Zizi egged you on to do this. Zizi’s always overstepping her role—ridiculous bloody name. Okay, you might’ve called her that when you were a little kid but it sounds stupid now. She’s never liked me, has she? I could kill her.” The expression on his face carried real threat.

“That’s appalling!” She shook him off angrily. “And you a man of the law!”

“I’m a man first,” he reminded her, anger flashing in his eyes.

“So, does that mean you have the right to lash out?” she shouted at him, although shouting wasn’t her style.

“Zizi is not at fault here,” she said, trying desperately to calm herself. “She had nothing to do with my decision, so keep her out of it. It’s about the two of us. It’s not working, Brett. You’re becoming intolerable to live with.”

He released a sharp whistling breath through his nose. “I’m becoming intolerable? You’re the who’s up until all hours of the night when I want you in bed with me. Goddamn that bloody woman!” he exclaimed, his handsome face ugly with hate. “She’s had far too much influence on you. She works on you until she takes over your mind.”

It was all so unfair! Zizi’s influence had always been good. Zizi was her confidante and dearest friend.

“Oh, spare me!” he groaned at her defense of her great-aunt. “The facts contradict your judgment. Your great-aunt’s never had the guts to live in the real world, floating around that old plantation house like some bloody witch. Hell, she’s more than a touch mad. Your grandmother, her own sister, has said as much.”

It was regrettably true. “Gran and Zizi are different kinds of people,” Alyssa said quietly, putting more space between them. “Zizi’s living the life she wants. Without her I wouldn’t be what I am today. She taught me not only how to paint and see beauty in so many different places, but about life in general. I don’t know what I’m going to do when she leaves me.”

“The old bitch will live until she’s ninety!” Brett scoffed.” You have me! Aren’t you supposed to love me? You have your parents, plenty of friends. You’re supposed to be such a fine painter—”

Alyssa rounded on him, saying the words she’d long held back. “You’re jealous of what I do, aren’t you?”

He didn’t even attempt to deny it. “I’m jealous of anything that takes you away from me. When you’re working you don’t even remember I exist. Couldn’t you have stayed a lawyer? You know how upset your parents were when you left the firm.”

“That was two years ago, Brett. Mom and Dad came to terms with it. I was always a dutiful daughter. I did what they wanted. I just never got any satisfaction out of practicing law. That’s your world, their world. It’s not mine. I’m an artist, but you don’t want me to be one. My painting’s only made you resentful. You’d be thrilled if I said I was going to stop painting altogether.”

“You bet!” He spoke with frightening grimness. “It was Zizi who managed to convince you that you had the gift!” He couldn’t resist the note of parody. “She even managed to pull a few strings to get you a showing. She chucked her own career—it didn’t give her satisfaction or fulfillment—yet she pushed you into it.”

“I’m making money, Brett.” She was regaining a little of her composure.

“You’re making money at last, you mean,” he reminded her sharply, totally overlooking the fact that he was living in her house. “Your parents bought you this place.” Obviously that devalued her standing in his eyes.

“So you got some acclaim. You have more going for you, that’s all. You’re young. You’re beautiful. You come from a distinguished legal family. Even dotty old Zizi was a name in her day. Elizabeth Jane Calvert! What happened to her? How come she burnt out overnight?”

Alyssa tried slow, deep breathing. “No one knows the answer to that one.” Not family, friends, agents, dealers. While still in her twenties, Zizi’s brilliant talent had earned her considerable renown. Those were her glory days, the ten-year period between 1960 and 1970. But Zizi had retired at the very early age of thirty to a reclusive life in an old sugar plantation house in tropical North Queensland. It had caused a sensation in the art world.

Alyssa’s eyes rested on the middle distance. Other famous artists had fled to the North to escape the rat race and gather the beauty of the tropical environment into their souls. North of Capricorn was glorious. She and Zizi had often cruised around the dazzlingly beautiful coral cays and emerald islands of the Great Barrier Reef in Zizi’s little sailing yacht, Cherub. It was Zizi who’d discovered that she had talent as a sailor. Indeed, by age sixteen she far outstripped her mentor much to Zizi’s amusement and pride. She loved the sea. She loved sailing. It was in her blood.

From time to time, other prominent artists who’d belonged to the colony had emerged from their rain forest sanctuaries to travel south to the big cities to show the civilized art world what masterpieces they had created. Zizi, however, had stayed there.

Infuriated by Alyssa’s inattention, Brett seized her by the arms. “Snap out of it, Ally! You can’t think I’m going to let you walk away from me! Not after what we’ve been to each other. I love you. I can’t possibly let you go. I hold your precious Zizi responsible for the change in you.”

She stared into his dark eyes, seeing a tiny red glow in their depths. “All Zizi wants is for me to be happy. I tried, Brett.”

“You shouldn’t have to try!” He shook her as if she were a child and a good shake would bring her to her senses.

“Take your hands off me.” Flinching, she broke away, rubbing her shoulder.

He came after her. “You’re everything I want, Alyssa. I’d kill anyone who tried to take you from me.”

Alyssa saw the violence in him, but she was driven by a risk-everything determination.

They stood a few feet apart, regarding each other like the warring couple they’d become. “You’re very needy, Brett. You want my undivided attention and if you don’t get it I have to tread my way through a minefield of scowling and sulking that goes on for days. It has to come to an end. I’m an artist. I’m going to remain an artist all my life.”

“Like Zizi?” His voice was full of contempt.

“I hope I’ll be like Zizi one day. I certainly haven’t reached her level of excellence yet.”

Brett threw up his hands in an impotent gesture of rage. “Who the hell even remembers the genius’s name these days?”

She sighed wearily. “Everyone in the art world knows of Elizabeth Jane Calvert. The private collectors who have her early paintings treasure them. They won’t part with them. That’s why they never come on the market…something did go seriously wrong in her life.”

“She hasn’t told you all about her nervous breakdown, has she?” he sneered. “Your grandmother said she had one. The trouble with you is you’re brainwashed!”

“And you’re a coward, attacking a woman in her absence.”

He stared back at her as though she’d drawn blood. “You go out of your way to provoke me. But I love you, Alyssa. I’ve loved you since I first laid eyes on you.”

She shook her head. “You fell in love with the way I looked, Brett. And with who I was, the daughter of two senior partners in the firm.”

“I fell in love with you. I fell in love with you before I even knew who you were. There’s something missing, though. You let me make love to you, but I can’t get close to you. Not your heart or your mind. One of these days you’ll discover that painting isn’t enough!”

“That’s not going to happen, Brett.” She spoke with finality.

His face contorted. “Well, I hate it! It’s separated us.” He lunged for her and she backed away swiftly, protecting herself from possible physical harm. “We can work this out,” he insisted. “If we break up, it’ll be a huge mistake. This is all that bloody woman’s fault.”

Distressed as she was, she was still desperate to show compassion. “I’m sorry, Brett. Truly sorry. But this is my life. I don’t love you.”

Brett sloughed off his civilized veneer as a snake sloughs off a skin. He surged toward her and struck her openhanded, but with such force she staggered back and fell to the floor, hitting her head against the foot of a teak cabinet.

For long moments he gazed down at her, rooted to the spot. Her long hair tumbled around her face in an ash-blond storm. In the fall, two buttons of her silk shirt had slipped their holes, so he could see the upward curves of her breasts.

Desire soared. He wondered what it would be like to take her right there, on the polished floor. He hunched down, wanting nothing more than to have her whether she wanted it or not. “Oh, God, Ally, I’m sorry. Forgive me.” Common decency briefly exerted itself.

He tried to get his arm around her, but his sexual excitement was showing in his flushed skin and his glittering eyes. Alyssa resisted wildly. One side of her face was scarlet, her skin bearing the imprint of his hand. Somewhere deep inside her ear a phone was ringing stridently, yet the outer shell was deaf. “Get out!” she cried, swallowing down her shock. She wasn’t going to grieve over their breakup anymore. This new Brett was a monster.

He just knelt there, staring at her. “You’re so beautiful!” Lust was coming off him in waves.

It presented a clear threat. “Get out!” Alyssa repeated, beyond fear. “You’re a brute and a coward. Violence is a sickness, an illness, a disease! You’re sick!”

The cold outrage in her voice, the condemnation in her eyes, slammed the brakes on hard. Brett started to remember who he was; more importantly, who she was. He thrust a trembling hand through his hair. “How did this happen?” he asked in a wondering voice.

Alyssa scrambled unaided to her feet, although she felt ill and more than a little dizzy. “I can tell you this. It will never happen again. Get out!”

He did.

Of course there were innumerable phone calls, messages she didn’t answer. Sheafs of her favorite flowers arrived, red roses galore. She refused to take delivery. It was over. Dreams had turned to ashes. She’d seen the real Brett, the dark side that had been hidden inside him. She could never ignore it now. She prayed he wouldn’t be foolish enough to stalk her, or show up at her door. She knew he was capable of it; she’d glimpsed that disturbing glow in the depths of his eyes. She wanted to keep their breakup private. If the full facts got out, it could mean the end of Brett’s promising legal career. She had no wish to harm him. She simply wanted out!

LOOKING BACK at her life over the weeks that followed, Alyssa felt deeply perturbed at how virulent Brett’s attitude to Zizi had become. He’d actually spent very little time in Zizi’s company, only two or three visits. She had so wanted them to like each other but as Brett had been at pains to tell her, he’d immediately perceived Zizi as a threat.

How could she have been so wrong about him? Her spirits sagged beneath the weight of her bad judgment. On her most recent visit to Zizi, she’d wisely gone on her own. They had a perfect, harmonious week together, sharing an empathy that went even deeper than the one she shared with her much-loved mother, Stephanie, and certainly her formidable grandmother, Mariel, Zizi’s older sister.

Then there was Zizi’s marvelous old plantation house, Flying Clouds. She’d adored it at first sight. As a child, it had seemed to her that there was no other house in the entire world like it. For one thing, it had a widow’s walk. She’d never heard of such a thing, let alone seen one. She’d found it thrilling beyond words to pace the narrow walkway looking out to the turquoise Coral Sea.

The house, a profoundly exotic jungle mansion, had a history. Of course it did. A Captain Richard Langford, an English adventurer-entrepreneur, had built it in the late 1800s. At that time Australia had been announcing to the Old Country that it really was the land of opportunity. Captain Langford had answered the call. It was his beautiful schooner, Medora, hired out for trade or charter that had brought him a fortune before he’d eventually turned his attention to starting a small shipping line that serviced the eastern seaboard. His ancestors today ran the giant Langford Container Lines, which transported anything and everything all over the world—automobiles, antiques, fine arts, boats, industrial machinery, whole households of personal effects, you name it. There was no stopping progress, and the Langfords had prospered.

Was it any wonder that in her make-believe games she’d often played the role of wife—and sometimes daughter—of that heroic sea captain? She’d stand high up on the observation platform, waiting for a glimpse of his ship returning home. Other times she was the grief-stricken widow, shedding real tears. For a change she’d be Peter Pan or Wendy and even the infamous Captain Hook. Treasure Island was a favorite and so were all sorts of swashbuckling pirate games—anything to do with the sea. Sometimes she was the beautiful damsel in distress, held for ransom, other times the dashing pirate. Zizi had always given her just the right old clothes to turn into a costume. Those were unforgettable days for the kind of child she was. Zizi understood her imaginative nature far better than anyone else. She was a dreamer, a great reader, often devouring books way beyond her years. It was Zizi who’d understood and nurtured her compulsion to draw and finally, paint.

Zizi!

She’d been totally happy at Flying Clouds, with the bond between them deepening steadily through the years. They both loved the house, although Zizi made it clear from the outset that it was haunted by the benign Captain Langford. At any rate, both of them found they were remarkably easy in his company. Captain Langford had actually died in his bed, but one of his descendants—another Richard and a renowned yachtsman—had drowned off the Reef when his yacht, Miranda, had capsized and sunk without trace during rough monsoon weather. That was in the late 1960s.

Some time after that, Zizi had made her final escape to the tropical North where, in her youth, she’d painted some of her most ravishing canvases. Back then she’d stayed on and off in the artists’ colony long since disbanded. With her intimate knowledge of the area, she’d had the great good fortune to acquire Flying Clouds cheaply, as most people, certainly the locals, believed it to be haunted.

The setting alone captured the imagination. The entrance fronted on to a private road lined by the white flowering evergreen species of frangipani that in the lush tropical climate had grown into very big trees. The rear faced the glorious Coral Sea, with a long, sea-weathered boardwalk that led to a zigzag flight of steps and on to the beach.

The house was of fine proportions and remarkably grand for the area. According to local folklore, Captain Langford’s mother was an American shipping heiress who’d lived in such a house when she was a girl. Whether that was true or not no one knew, but all agreed it was a good story.

The two-story—three if one counted the widow’s walk—was constructed of brilliant white stuccoed sandstone with deep verandas decorated and embellished with distinctive white cast-iron lace railings that appeared again on the upper walkway. The verandas shaded the house from the tropical sun while still allowing every available sea breeze to pass through. The shutters for the French doors, three to either side of the solid cedar front door, and the door itself were painted so dark a green that in certain lights they appeared a glossy black. The huge roof was a harmonious terra-cotta red.

At some stage before the turn of the twentieth century, Flying Clouds became a working sugar plantation using native labor brought in from the Melanesian and Polynesian islands. This scheme, at first a fairly innocent importation of cheap labor, quickly degenerated into the cruel practice known as “blackbirding,” when Pacific Islanders were more often kidnapped from their island homes than offered paying jobs. The Queensland government had finally outlawed the practice in the early 1900s.

These days the house was almost lost in a luminous green jungle that was forever breaking out in extravagant fruit and flower. It would be impossible to starve in the tropics. Tropical fruit in abundance, dropping most of the harvest on to the ground—pawpaws, papayas, mangoes, bananas, custard apples, passion fruit, melons, many new varieties she didn’t even know the name of. Every backyard had a macadamia tree, indigenous to Queensland and named after the Australian doctor John Macadam. This fine source of protein the aborigines had been enjoying for tens of thousands of years. Sated on fruit and nuts, one only needed to throw in a fishing line to avail oneself of some of the best seafood in the world.

The sparkling Coral Sea wasn’t visible from the ground floor, but there was a breathtaking view from the upper story’s balconies and more stupendous again, though a bit chancy in high wind, the widow’s walk. Zizi had always listened when Alyssa made up her endless stories about “The Captain.” It was a secret between the two of them. Her mother regarded Zizi as an endlessly fascinating eccentric, eccentricity being a perfectly acceptable part of the artistic temperament. Mariel, on the other hand, was of the firm opinion that her sister had lost all track of reality.

Neither woman visited Zizi much anymore. Mariel, as strong as a horse, always cited a growing number of psychosomatic ailments—high blood pressure, tachycardia, stress headaches and the like. She claimed she couldn’t abide the tropical heat, which was probably true, though she lived in subtropical Brisbane. Stephanie, though deeply fond of Zizi, was a topflight barrister who had little or no spare time to visit a place that required half a day just to get there.

An only child, Alyssa had grown up knowing her parents hoped she’d follow them into the law. She had bowed to their expectations, completing her law degree and working for three years as an associate in the firm. That was where she’d met Brett Harris, handsome, clever, ambitious. In those days he used to hang on her every word!

She hadn’t been unhappy at the firm. Most of the work allotted to her she found interesting and sometimes challenging, but her heart wasn’t in it. She actually preferred her voluntary work at the women’s refuge, where she’d made good friends and been truly effective. Zizi, realizing that she was floundering in her legal career, had come out of her shell to have an old friend of hers, the highly respected art critic Leonard Vaughn, take a look at the best of Alyssa’s work, which she’d painted while staying at the plantation.

The two of them worked wonderfully well together in Zizi’s large, airy, light-filled studio, which smelled of paint, turpentine, linseed oil, varnish, glue, fixatives and always the salty scent of the sea and a million tropical flowers. Alyssa continually strived to match Zizi’s brilliance. The irony was, within a few years she was receiving the critical acclaim, the hefty prices and certainly the media exposure that had eluded Zizi for most of her working life.

Her great quest was to persuade Zizi to give at least one showing. There were so many wonderful works of hers the public should see, if only she could persuade Zizi. So far, despite the fact that Zizi loved her dearly, she’d been unsuccessful. Zizi was adamant that her work would remain hidden from the world.

When I’m gone, my darling, maybe…

Alyssa couldn’t bear to think of the time her great-aunt would go out of her life. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Zizi was fit and healthy. Zizi might be seventy, but she easily could pass for a woman in her late fifties. And a beautiful one at that. Alyssa wanted her beloved great-aunt to live forever. There was simply no one who could replace her.

IT WAS A BRILLIANTLY fine Saturday morning three uneventful weeks later. Alyssa was extremely grateful for this hiatus, although she feared it was only the eye of the storm. Indeed, for days now she’d been tormented by a vague sense of unease she couldn’t shake off. Now she sat on her deck rereading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi when the phone rang. The kitchen extension was closest. She swung her legs off the recliner, put her book down on the glass-topped table, then went inside to answer it.

She expected it to be Zizi. She’d called her the previous evening and again earlier that morning, getting only Zizi’s charming, cultured voice saying, “I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message after the beep.” She had done so. The older Zizi got, the more she intended to keep in touch with her, a daily call as opposed to twice a week. An old saying kept reverberating in her head. Live alone. Die alone. That couldn’t be allowed to happen to Zizi.

It was her mother, whose voice was so similar to Zizi’s Alyssa often mistook one for the other. Strange, how her mother, a beautiful woman, looked and sounded more like Zizi than she did her own mother, Mariel. Mariel had lacked Zizi’s beauty, although she was undeniably a force to be reckoned with.

MUCH LATER Alyssa would say she’d known at some level what her mother was going to tell her the instant she picked up the phone. Hadn’t she been experiencing those shivery little premonitions?

Her mother, the supremely calm, professional woman, sounded distraught. “It’s Zizi,” she said, with a sob. “There’s no good way to tell you this, darling, but she’s gone. We’ve lost her. A neighbor, an Adam Hunt, couldn’t raise her on the phone so he went to the house to check on her. He found her dead in the bathroom. Apparently she’d fallen while getting into the bath, cracked her head, and—” Stephanie choked on her tears.

Alyssa half fainted into a chair. “Mom, what are you saying? Zizi always took a shower! It couldn’t have happened that way. Zizi never used the bath. She’d slipped once and nearly broke her neck. She always took a shower after that.”

“Try to stay calm, darling,” her mother urged when she was anything but calm herself. “I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved her. We all did, but you two were especially close. Your father’s very upset. He took the phone call. So, of course, is poor Mother. She’s tremendously agitated. I had to call her doctor to the house but thank God he didn’t find much wrong with her. Your father can’t get away, so you and I will have to go up. This is an absolute tragedy. Zizi’s so young for her years. God, was so young. Why did I wait so long to see her?” Stephanie berated herself.

Alyssa tried to offer comfort. “Your heavy work schedule, Mom,” she said, fighting down her own grief until she got off the phone.

“Why did she choose to live so far away from us?” Stephanie lamented. “No one was happy about it. That bloody place, it’s beautiful but it’s so remote. I’ve always agonized that she might die alone.” Stephanie’s teary voice betrayed the extent of her grief. “I can’t believe Zizi’s left us.”

“Neither can I!” In the golden heat Alyssa found herself shivering convulsively.

THERE WAS AN AUTOPSY. Everyone accepted the coroner’s verdict. The blow to the head wasn’t the cause of death, although it was the major contributing factor. Zizi had drowned. She would’ve become dizzy, lost consciousness, then slipped beneath the water. It was all too tragic.

Once her body was released by the coroner, the funeral quickly followed. Zizi had expressed the wish to have her ashes scattered in the Coral Sea, but Mariel as next of kin wouldn’t have it. She overrode that wish, insisting on having Zizi’s casket flown to Brisbane where she could be buried in the family plot so “we can keep an eye on her.”

Such an odd way to put it!

It was a small, private family funeral, although Mariel had been too upset to come. No notice had been placed in the papers. Yet when Alyssa accompanied her parents back to the car after the short service, she saw Brett, dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie, standing some distance off. The sight of him chilled her.

“Isn’t that Brett?” Stephanie asked. “I expect he feels dreadful.”

“How did he even know about Zizi?” Alyssa looked at her father. “Did you tell him, Dad?”

“My dear, Brett has left the firm,” Ian Sutherland answered.

“When was this? Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked incredulously.

“We felt you had enough to contend with. Brett handed in his resignation. I accepted it. I could see he was deeply distressed by the breakdown of the relationship. I don’t think there’s any question that he was—is—madly in love with you. I was sorry to lose him, but it’s better that way, the situation being what it is. He won’t have the slightest difficulty getting into Havelock Hayes. I told him I’d put in a word for him. Brett’s certainly clever, but I have to tell you now that the relationship is over, your mother and I feel relieved. We weren’t all that happy about you and Brett.”

Alyssa looked from one to the other, having difficulty taking it in. “You never said.”

Ian Sutherland smiled wryly. “You’re twenty-six years old, Alyssa. Your mother and I left it to your own good sense, didn’t we, darling?” He glanced down lovingly at his wife. “You deserve someone with a more open nature,” Ian Sutherland said, picking his words carefully. “More openhearted. I don’t know exactly what it is in Brett, but no doubt you do. There’s something…secretive about him.”

Alyssa tried to calm her thoughts. “Things bothered you both and you didn’t tell me?”

“Actually, darling, we were on the brink of expressing our concern.” Stephanie put an arm around her daughter and gave her a little hug. “But just as your father said, you handled it yourself. Trying to put up with someone who constantly needs attention is difficult. That’s going to be a problem for Brett. In a sense he’s his own worst enemy.”

Alyssa fell silent. She was too distressed to pursue the subject.

“Well, there you go!” her father exclaimed, as though that settled it. “Best acknowledge the poor chap. It was decent of him to come, although I always got the feeling he saw Zizi more as an opponent than a friend. Still, no reason not to be kind to him. Your mother and I will wait in the car.”

Alyssa felt no desire to acknowledge Brett. Had her parents known he’d struck her, things would be very different. Brett’s certainty that she wouldn’t tell them was evident in his coming here. He had plenty of self-confidence, the ingrained belief that he was always right, and she’d come to suspect he enjoyed danger. Why was he really here? It wasn’t to pay his respects to Zizi. It could have been sadistic curiosity. That was more in keeping with his character. Or perhaps he was trying to demonstrate to her what a civilized person he was.

She moved toward him but stopped halfway, forcing him to join her on the path. No way was she was leaving her parents’ sight.

“What are you doing here, Brett?” He appeared thinner than usual in his elegant Italian suit. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t slept. He wore an air of dejection, but that, of course, could be an act. She realized Brett had the ability to play many roles.

He seemed surprised by her question. “I came to pay my respects, of course,” he said in a subdued voice.

“How extraordinary, given your attitude toward Zizi.”

His smile was more of a grimace. “I wanted this chance to tell you I can never forgive myself for the things I said about her. I never meant a word of it, Ally. That was my jealousy talking. I’ve never loved a woman like I love you. I regret my behavior more deeply than I can ever say. I beg you to forgive me. I love you so much. I’ll never stop loving you.”

Alyssa nodded slowly. “I used to hear that all the time from men who beat up their wives and girlfriends,” she said. “I love you. I can’t live without you, followed by I’ll kill you and the kids if you don’t come back to me. Some of them did. You didn’t think you could get away with it, did you? With me?”

“I went crazy!” Brett said, abandoning that dull voice. “I’ve never struck a woman in my life before.”

“Somehow I have the feeling you have,” Alyssa answered, playing a sudden hunch. “I bet if I had the firm’s investigators make some inquiries, they’d come up with something. I’m reasonably sure I’m not the first female to suffer your aggression.”

Panic flashed across his face so quickly she would have missed it if she hadn’t been studying him intently. “You wouldn’t.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “But you have a violent streak, Brett. You didn’t keep it hidden for long. My advice is to seek help. I mean that. What would you have done if the crack to my head had been more serious? Would you have called a doctor, an ambulance, my parents? Would you have relied on me to lie for you? I wouldn’t have.”

“Yet you haven’t betrayed me, have you?” A flicker of triumph came into his dark eyes as he stared at her.

Alyssa stared back in stupefaction. “I kept quiet for the sake of what I thought we had, Brett. Also, I’m giving you a chance to seek professional help. I have no wish to harm your legal career, but if I ever hear you’ve attacked some other woman, I’ll come forward to back her story. So watch out!”

He took a step toward her and despite herself Alyssa felt her blood freeze. “Ally, that will never happen.”

She was in control again. “Don’t touch me, Brett.” She wondered why she felt such alarm. He didn’t look threatening, but appeared to be buckling beneath the weight of remorse.

He drew back, smiling at her so tenderly it made her ill. “Sweetest love, will no amount of repentance wash away my sin?”

Another person, another role! “What are you playing at now, Brett?” she asked. “As far as I know, you have no links with any religion.”

He looked puzzled. “I believe in good and evil, Ally,” he said with absolute conviction. “I mightn’t believe in God, but I believe in the devil.”

“Maybe that’s because you’ve seen him!” She had no idea where that remark came from. “But you can’t have one without the other. If there’s a devil, there must be a God. Pick which team you want to be on.” She was on the verge of walking away from him. “I won’t thank you for coming today, bearing in mind your attitude to Zizi. It was just a pretext to see me.”

“I admit it.” Persuasion poured into his hypnotic eyes. “Perhaps you’ll see me some other time?” he asked, his voice full of a touching hope.

Alyssa didn’t reply.

“I give you my word I’ll seek help. I love you, Ally,” he repeated passionately. “I want to be with you. You were never in any danger that awful night.”

“On the contrary, you enjoyed punishing me.” She spoke with intuitive certainty. “And you wanted a whole lot more. You wanted forced sex.”

He drew a hand across his mouth as if wiping away a bad taste. “I just snapped, Ally. It was the way you seemed to be abandoning me for your aunt.”

She felt furious and humiliated. “That was all in your own mind, Brett. Don’t say any more. It isn’t working. We’ve buried Zizi today.”

“And my heart goes out to you, Ally.” He assumed an expression of deepest sympathy she knew perfectly well was feigned.

“That does nothing whatever to comfort me, Brett.”

She walked away.

She didn’t look back.