Читать книгу Forgotten Vows - Modean Moon - Страница 10

She was broken, and even she didn’t know how badly.

In the long hours of the previous night, Edward had plotted what he would do today. He’d promised himself he would see Jennie, show his contempt for her and her larcenous heart, give in to Madeline’s prudent suggestions to file for divorce and then—oh, God—and then find some way to take his much-needed revenge.

But now that he had seen her, Edward knew he could do none of the rest.

Revenge? He remembered Jennie’s eyes—laughing, glowing with what he’d thought was love, lost in contemplation of the work on her latest canvas. He thought of the stacks of completed work that had filled her studio, of the color and beauty with which she had always surrounded herself, and another small piece of him died. He felt that piece shift and tear. Curious, he thought numbly. He had thought himself past grief.

“Please,” Jennie whispered again.

Edward took a deep breath. Revenge? This was beyond anything his fertile mind would have—could have come up with.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said softly, walking to her side. He reached for her. “Here I am. Take my hand.”

Jennie closed her eyes briefly as she slid her hand into his much larger one and tilted her head to look up toward him, just as she had countless times in the past. Edward watched the panic fade from her beautiful eyes. For a moment, forgetting, Edward expected recognition to flood them. For a moment, he expected her to smile, to whisper his name with that breathless catch of anticipation that had always beguiled him.

Instead, he saw a curious blankness in the depths of her eyes, a subtle, almost unnoticeable lack of focus, and then, finally, faint confusion.

“Do I know you?” Jennie asked.

Did she? Had she ever really known him? “Once,” he said, swallowing back every angry word he’d ever wanted to hurl at her, gentling his voice as he gentled his words.

She tightened her hand in his and reached with her other hand to grip his arm. “Before?”

“Yes,” he said, knowing instinctively that she meant before whatever had brought her to Aval on. “Before.”

Tears trembled once again on her lashes, and her soft lower lip quivered slightly before she covered it with one fragile hand and closed her eyes against an emotion so strong, Edward felt it vibrate through her, and because of their joined hands, through him.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought—I was afraid no one would look for me.”

Edward heard a world of fear and loneliness in her words, far more than seemed possible in the pleasant surroundings of the vicarage garden.

“Who are you?” Jennie asked him, once again grasping his arm. “Who am I?”

Edward covered her hand with his, marveling as always at the contrast between her soft, fair, almost translucent skin and his rougher, darker, almost swarthy coloring. He didn’t know which of them was trembling; it didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the emotion that gathered in his throat, making speech all but impossible. What mattered was this fragile, delicate woman who was looking up at him with such hope. How could he tell her who she was and what she had done? How could he even believe it himself?

Why had Jennie left him? Not for money. He’d bet his life on that. Now. How—why—had he ever thought her capable of that?

His arms ached with his need to pull her close, to hold her against his heart, to fill his senses with her light perfume, to take the comfort her arms, to feel the passion her sweet body had always brought him. Instead, he restrained himself, limiting himself to smoothing his hand over hers one more time before taking a step away, still holding her hand. A lifeline, he thought, looking at their entwined fingers. But for her? Or for himself?

“I think—” Remarkable. His voice almost worked. But what could he tell her? “I think before either of us says much more, we need to talk with Reverend Winthrop.”

A second man was waiting in the parlor with Reverend Winthrop. He studied Edward critically and narrowed his eyes when he saw what Edward only now noticed: Jennie’s scraped knees and the small tear in her skirt. At about six foot two, the man stood eye to eye with Edward, although he probably carried a few more well-muscled pounds than Edward. He had the look of a battered warrior, in his eyes and in the lines of his face. Edward had no doubt that somewhere on his person, this man carried a badge of some sort—a fact that was quickly confirmed.

“Good afternoon, Miss Jennie,” he said in a gravelly voice that carried the remnants of a soft southern drawl.

Jennie smiled toward him. “Good afternoon, Sheriff Lambert. Isn’t it wonderful? This man knows me.”

“Might be, Miss Jennie. Might be. You hurt yourself?”

Jennie grimaced and sighed. “Am I a mess? I fell. It was stupid, I know. To fall, I mean. I was trying to walk in the garden alone. But, Sheriff Lambert, this man knows who I am. He said he wouldn’t tell me until we came back to the house. Ask him. Please ask him.”

Lambert put both his hands on Jennie’s shoulders, with the familiarity of someone who had done so many times before, and Edward forced himself to deny the tension that tightened in him.

“I will, Miss Jennie. But now I want you to go upstairs with Mrs. Higgins and take care of your lovely knees.”

Jennie straightened her small shoulders, and Edward recognized the defiant lift of her chin. “Sheriff Lambert,” she said in the same gentle voice Edward had once heard her use on a gallery owner who had made the mistake of thinking he could lie to her about sales of her work, “in spite of appearances and circumstances, I am a mature adult. I will not be sent to my room like a child.”

“No, Miss Jennie, and I wouldn’t do that to you, either. But I’m going to talk to this man and find out who he is before I let him try to tell me who you are. When I’m satisfied, we’ll all talk together. And that’s a promise. Until then, you just don’t go getting your emotions in a lather.

“You’ve been hurt enough, and none of us,” he continued, giving her shoulders a little shake, “none of us is going to let you be hurt again. Understand?”

After Jennie and a woman introduced as Mrs. Higgins left the parlor, Edward walked to the fireplace and looked again at the framed watercolor. His ship, the Lady B, named by his father years earlier, created the visual focus for the painting. Even at rest, bare-masted, with no sign of a crew, she seemed to dance in the water, to shimmer across the misty canvas.

He bowed his head in his hand. What now? How had Jennie come to Avalon? Why had she come to Avalon? And how had she been hurt? He straightened his shoulders, drawing his strength around him, and turned. Wilbur Winthrop was still standing near the door to the hallway. Edward pierced him with an accusing glare.

“You didn’t tell me she was blind.”

The two other men exchanged a long, measuring look, but it was Lambert who spoke. “Well, now, that answers one question, but it sure does raise up a host of others.”

“I’ll need to use your telephone,” Edward told the minister. “I have to call my assistant, arrange to have my plane flown here, put a—a what?—a neurologist? on standby, have someone get my apartment ready for Jennie—”

“I don’t think so.”

The quiet determination in Lambert’s voice put an abrupt end to Edward’s disjointed planning.

“You don’t think so? Sheriff, I have every right to take my wife home.” Edward heard the words spilling from his mouth.

Where had those words come from? He had fully intended to leave her to her own devices, with her greed to keep her company. Greed? Jennie?

He felt a hand on his arm and dimly realized Winthrop had led him across the room, was pushing him down into the chintz-covered chair, was once again wrapping his fingers around a squat, heavy glass. “Drink,” Winthrop insisted. “You look like the walking wounded.”

Edward did as he was told. He laid his head back against the chair and drew deep, even breaths, at first barely aware of what he was doing, then gradually recognizing what was happening to him. He began fighting the shock, fighting the fear and anger that had waited just below his conscriousness to claim him. Gradually, he summoned the strength of will that had sustained him over the years.

He couldn’t come apart now; he hadn’t since his parents’ deaths, and he’d been only ten at the time. He was an adult now, a grown man who could face any problem.

He became aware of the force with which he grasped the chair’s arms, of the silence in the room broken only by the ticking of a clock, of his own breathing. He became aware of Lambert watching him. Slowly, he released his grip on the chair, eased his breathing and met Sheriff Lambert’s steady gaze. Instead of the derision or pity he expected to find in the sheriff’s eyes, Edward found a grudging respect, as well as a wariness he felt sure this battle-weary warrior showed everyone.

“I have some questions for you, Mr. Carlton,” Lambert said, taking a small notebook from his suit coat and making no reference to what had just passed. “Let’s start with Jennie’s full name.”

“Allison Jennifer Carlton,” Edward told him in the same dispassionate tone of voice the sheriff used. Then, realizing Jennie had claimed the name Carlton for only a few hours before she disappeared, he added, a little too loudly in the waiting silence of the room. “Long. Her maiden name was Long.”

He saw Winthrop’s head jerk up, saw the horrified questioning glance the minister shot at the watercolor he so prized.

“Yes,” Edward told him, without waiting for the man to ask. “Yes,” he said, sighing, expelling a little of his own pain. “Jennie is that Allison Long.”

Jennie leaned back in the chaise longue in her room, her knees faintly smarting from the antiseptic Matilda had applied, her ego faintly smarting from being sent to her room.

Her life was being discussed downstairs. She had a right to be there. She had a right to have a voice in any decision made.

She smiled ruefully. Sheriff Lambert was probably right to exclude her. Apparently, she hadn’t done such a bang-up job of running her own life until now.

Her finger ached. Absently, she rubbed it, as she found herself doing often when she tried to put order to the puzzle of her life. The doctors told her they could fix it—a simple surgical procedure—rebreak the bone, set it properly. Jennie shivered. She’d had enough pain to last a lifetime. Too much pain, she acknowledged, remembering how it had been when she first woke up in the Avalon hospital.

She closed her eyes, and the field behind her closed lids grew dark. It wasn’t always dark; it was—it was more like walking into a dense fog just after twilight. Interesting, she thought. A new analogy. Before, she had compared her lack of sight to trying to look through layer upon layer of vaporous gray scarves.

When she slept, she had vision: color—vibrating, shimmering color—if not always shape. And sometimes her dreams were peopled. One person appeared repeatedly—a tall, stern man. In her dreams, she teased him, sensing it might somehow be similar to baiting a tiger. And although she never clearly saw his face, on rare occasions she found her efforts rewarded by a rusty, little-used smile.

Was he the one who had come for her?

She had been so afraid—When? Jennie couldn’t consciously remember feeling the soul-shriveling depth of fear she now knew had once gripped her. When?

“Here you go, love,” Matilda said as she entered the room. “Blackberry tea and some of Mrs. Winthrop’s wonderful chicken salad.”

Jennie looked up, not distracted by Matilda’s loving offering. The man who had come for her was tall. Was he… dark? Was he… stern?

“Matilda,” Jennie asked. “The man who—the man downstairs—what does he look like?”

“Ah, Jennie, Jennie,” the older woman said softly, sitting beside her on the chaise and placing the tray across Jennie’s lap. “I suppose he’s a fine-looking man, healthy, strong of will and body, but, child, he doesn’t look like he’s ever in his life smiled.”

Sheriff Lucas Lambert’s office was in keeping with the affluence of the town: state-of-the-art computers and communications equipment shared spacious, carpeted quarters with high-tech filing and retrieval systems, welldesigned furniture and cubicle dividers and professionally uniformed employees.

The office was distinctly out of keeping with the rugged, world-weary man who seated himself behind his oversize mahogany desk and glanced quickly through a file a deputy had handed him as he and Edward had entered the building.

Lambert tossed the folder onto his desk, glanced at it, glanced at Edward, opened a desk drawer and brought out a much fatter folder and placed it beside the first one. He took the pen and small notebook from his jacket and aligned them with the folders. He picked up the pen, rolling it between his fingers as he studied Edward. Then, apparently reaching a decision, he dropped the pen to the desktop. “Your identity checks out.”

Seated in a chair in front of the desk, Edward only nodded. He was unaccustomed to being doubted, surprised there had ever been any question of his truthfulness.

“You didn’t report your wife missing.”

“There didn’t seem much point in reporting anything,” Edward said tightly. “I had a—a farewell note from her telling me how much better her life would be without me in it.”

“Didn’t you find it a little strange that your wife of— what?—eight hours or so just up and took off?”

“Hell, yes, I found it strange,” Edward said with quiet fury. “As strange as the fact that our airline reservations for our trip to Hawaii had unexplainably been rescheduled for a later flight, as strange as the fact that my private office was burglarized that afternoon requiring me to go down there. As strange as the fact that when I returned to my home, my brand-new wife, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds and several other reasonably valuable items were missing. As strange as the fact that when I went to Jennie’s studio, trying to make sense of what had happened, I found it stripped of any sign of her, including all of her unsold work.

“Yes, Lambert. I found it damned strange. But I had a note from her. A note, damn it man, that stripped me as bare as that studio. A note taunting me with the wonderful new life she was going to lead once she broke free from me.”

Lambert leaned back in his chair, once again sliding his pen through his fingers, once again seeming to come to a decision. He stood and nudged the fatter of the two folders across the desk toward Edward. “Take a look at this while I change clothes. Then we’ll both go take a look at the place where your new bride spent two, maybe three days of that wonderful new life.”

Edward was feeling sick, physically ill, when Lambert returned to the office wearing jeans and climbing boots and carrying a lightweight jacket. He dropped another pair of boots at Edward’s feet.

“You’ll need these,” Lambert said. “I think they’ll fit you.”

Edward closed the file, but he couldn’t close away the memory of the police photographs or the medical reports. He couldn’t close away the rage that he felt growing inside him—the need to hit—to hurt. He held his hand flat on the cover of the folder as if by doing so he could hold all its horrible contents away from him, away from Jennie. God, no wonder she didn’t remember. Thank God she didn’t remember.

“What did this to her?”

Lambert took the folder from him and put it back in the desk drawer before he answered. “For a while, I entertained the thought that maybe you did this to her.”

They took the sheriff’s Land Rover. They’d driven for over an hour, most of it on narrow dirt roads, the last fifteen or twenty minutes uphill on a rutted, hole-pocked narrow trail. They’d long before left the green surrounding Avalon and had entered what Edward had always thought typical of eastern New Mexico—harsh, rocky land, barren except for scattered cactus, which now, but only for a few short days, blazed with color, outcroppings of rock, the badlands of hundreds of B-grade western movies, and mountains—harsh and unforgiving.

Lambert eased his vehicle across a boulder-strewn dry gully, left the track and pulled to a stop at the edge of the precipice that overlooked the dry bed of some ancient ocean.

“Watch your step,” Lambert told him and felt his way over the edge and onto a barely visible animal trail. With only one quick glance toward the valley floor, Edward followed, feeling rocks sliding beneath his sturdy boots.

Finally, they reached an outcropping of rock that formed a narrow ledge and an overhang that created a sort of cave. The animal trail continued downward, but Lambert stopped.

“There are two ways to get here,” Lambert told him. “Up from the valley floor, or down from the ridge.” He pointed to a shallow depression beneath the overhang. “Two high-school boys cutting class and out exploring for outlaw gold found Jennie there.

“We don’t know when she lost her sight, but even sighted, there’s no way she got here by herself. She either fell or was pushed from about where we parked,”

In the last few hours, Edward had been hit with almost more than he could stand. For his sanity, for Jennie’s sake, he had to emotionally separate Jennie from this anonymous broken woman who had been discarded on a New Mexico mountainside. He had to get his protective armor in place, had to stop acting like a terrified ten-year-old. Never again, he’d promised himself years ago, would he give in to the nameless, numbing horror he had once experienced. And he hadn’t. Until now. But not until Jennie had he let himself be vulnerable again.

“You’re sure she didn’t come here for some reason?”

“What reason?” Lambert asked. “And yes, I’m sure. She couldn’t have walked it. The trail down from the top is a cakewalk compared to the one up from the valley floor. And we found no vehicle.

“You last saw her on the seventeenth of November,” Lambert asked abruptly. “What was she wearing?”

What was she wearing? For a moment, the memory swirled through Edward’s mind.

He pulled the sheet over Jennie’s bare shoulder and smoothed the dark hair away from her cheek, placing a kiss that was much more chaste than anything he felt at that moment on the tender skin he had just exposed.

“God, I hate to leave you,” he told her, tracing his finger over her cheek, outlining lips that only a short while before had driven him nearly crazy with her untutored passion.

“And I hate for you to leave, but you know Madeline wouldn’t have called unless it was important,” she said.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “Really all right? I didn’t hurt you?”

She grinned at him then. “One of my deepest, darkest secrets is this hidden desire I’ve had to be ravished by a loving madman. Edward?” She sat up in the bed, letting the sheet fall away from her as she captured his face in her small hands.

“Edward, I’m teasing you. Of course you didn’t hurt me. You’d never do that.”

“She was—she was dressing for dinner,” he said, forcing himself back to the present. “We were going to go out to eat when I returned… before we caught our flight.” Edward threw off his memories. “Could she have parked somewhere else and walked in?”

Lambert shook his head. “She was wearing a white silk dress, silk lingerie. No jewelry. No hose. No shoes. The boys found her on the twenty-first.”

“So she had four days to get here.” Edward focused his thoughts on those days rather than on the way Jennie had looked in the photos. “Four days to—to do what?”

Again Lambert shook his head. “I think she was here at least as early as the nineteenth.”

“Why?”

“It rained on the nineteenth. Her clothes were… muddy.”

“Who?” Edward shouted. It was either shout or scream. He looked at the ridge above him. “What kind of animal would do this?”

“I don’t know,” Lambert told him. He studied Edward carefully. “And until I find out, Jennie’s a ward of the court. I’m her guardian. Until we find whoever did this, I’m not letting you take her out of my jurisdiction.”

Edward met Lambert’s appraisal with one of his own. “I won’t try to,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem I’ve done too good a job of protecting her. I appreciate all the help I can get. I do want to bring some of my people here, make arrangements to stay as long as necessary. I’m not leaving Jennie.”

Lambert nodded his agreement. “I’ve got some ideas of my own now that we know who she is, but do you have any suggestions as to how we find the bastard who did this?”

Edward looked over the valley floor. He wasn’t ready, or able, yet, even to consider that Jennie had been taken from him, that she hadn’t left voluntarily. But even if she had left willingly with someone, she had been betrayed even more brutally than Edward.

“There was no ransom demand.”

Lambert waited quietly while Edward sifted through his memories, realigning them, examining them in the light of what he had learned in the last few hours.

“Two suggestions,” Edward said finally. “We need to find the former security guard at my apartment. He quit without notice and left the day before the wedding. And…maybe you’d better do this. Ask Winthrop’s daughter where she got the painting.”

Edward allowed his bittersweet memory only a moment’s life.

“It was Jennie’s wedding present to me. The last time I saw it, it was in my apartment—and so was Jennie.”