The Night In Question Page 16

  She closed her menu and laid it aside. “I’ve lost some weight since we last met too,” she said quietly. “Maybe neither one of us is the same woman we were back then, Barbara. For what it’s worth, I never blamed you for telling the truth at my trial. I—I always wanted you to know that.”

  “I thought you would hate me.” Barbara’s voice was low. “Not just for having to tell everyone I saw you hand the bomb to Kenneth before takeoff, but because I got custody of Willa. If I’d had a child and lost her, I would never have forgiven the woman who’d taken her from me.”

  Julia was saved from having to reply by their waiter coming back with their drinks. She cast a beseeching glance at Max as her turn came to place her order, and he interpreted her silent plea.

  “Jules, the sole for you as well?” he interjected smoothly, handing both their menus to the waiter. She nodded mutely. A moment later she felt his hand reach for hers under the table, grip it with brief tightness and withdraw.

  The small gesture helped. “You didn’t take her from me, Babs. I never even thought of it like that—well, not when I was thinking logically,” she added. “While I was in prison I couldn’t take care of Willa. I wouldn’t have been able to survive if I hadn’t known she was safe with you.”

  “But now you’re out.” Behind the brown eyes Julia thought she saw a flash of pain. “Now you’re out and you want her back, don’t you?”

  Barbara had changed, she thought. The one Tennant who’d always shrunk from speaking out, the meekly compliant daughter of Olivia and the overlooked sister of Kenneth and Noel, in the past she would never have brought an unpleasant subject out into the open. But that was why she’d requested this meeting, Julia reminded herself unhappily. It was obvious Babs was determined to make her position clear, however nervous she was.

  “Did Noel tell you that we talked with him yesterday?”

  Max’s tone was professionally detached, and for once she was grateful for the lack of emotion he was displaying. She saw Barbara take a deep breath.

  “Noel phoned me, yes,” she admitted, her voice trembling only slightly. “I knew that Julia was out, of course. But Noel said you seemed to think she was innocent, Agent Ross. He said you’d reopened the investigation.”

  “Not officially.” Max frowned and leaned back in his chair. “But your brother got the rest of it right, Ms. Van Hale. I made a mistake, and I’m trying to undo that mistake now.”

  “So you do believe she’s innocent.” Babs’s brown eyes widened as she looked from Max to Julia. “You got out on a technicality, Julia. For heaven’s sake, I saw you do it. You handed that wrapped package to Kenneth—you know you did!”

  “I handed Kenneth Willa’s birthday present!” Stunned by the sudden attack, Julia gripped the table edge with both hands. “I had no idea there was a bomb inside, and you know that, Babs!”

  “I know that’s what your defence was. But a jury found you guilty anyway, Julia, because that story just never held water.” Twin spots of hectic color stood out on Barbara’s cheekbones. She went on, her voice more intense than Julia had ever heard it. “They found scraps of that same wrapping paper at your cottage on Cape Ann, and they found chemicals too—chemicals that proved you’d assembled the bomb that killed my husband and my brother and two other victims, right there on your kitchen table.”

  “But we never could prove how Julia had learned to construct a bomb,” Max interjected, again keeping his voice tonelessly calm. “That was always a flaw in the prosecutor’s case.”

  “She was a Tennant, for heaven’s sake!” Babs snapped. “My mother’s cook could probably rig one up if she had to. We’re in the chemical business, Agent Ross.”

  “Not all of you. Not anymore.” Max sounded unimpressed. “You’re not—you’re content to let Olivia run things for the next fifteen or sixteen years. Your brother Noel wouldn’t have Tenn-Chem now if it was handed to him.”

  “It was handed to him. I handed it to him. I asked him to be Willa’s business trustee, not my mother.” For a moment Barbara seemed more surprised than angry. “Olivia takes care of the day-to-day running of the company, but she has to submit reports to Noel on a regular basis.” The soft eyes hardened. “My mother gets to see her granddaughter once a month, with me present, but that’s as far as I allow her influence over Willa to go. She had three children of her own and she damaged all of us. I won’t allow her to damage Willa.”

  “So she’s not enrolled for Hartley House?” Disregarding everything else Barbara had said, Julia focused on her last statement. “Noel seemed to think that Olivia intended—”

  “I’d die before I let Willa be shut away there,” Barbara said. “My mother may want her to go to Hartley, but it’s not going to happen. Willa’s going to have a happy childhood—a perfect childhood. She’s not going to go through what I went through.”

  Her voice shook on the last few words and she fell silent. As if he’d been waiting for his cue, their waiter appeared, and Julia busied herself with her linen napkin while her lunch was placed before her.

  Babs’s conviction that she was guilty was obviously near-unshakeable, and that meant that her hopes of getting Willa back without a court battle were probably dim—unless and until she and Max learned who the real killer had been, she thought. Carefully she smoothed the pink linen on her lap, blinking back her tears. But the terrible fear that had dogged her since yesterday had just been proven unfounded. Meek and mild Babs, who in the past had never stood up against her mother in any situation, was ferociously determined to keep Willa out of the boarding school that had been such hell for herself and her brothers.

  A wave of shaky relief washed over her. She lifted her gaze and found Max looking at her, his features drawn with concern. She gave him a watery smile and saw him flash her a quick half grin in return before he turned to Barbara.

  “As I said, I made a mistake, Ms. Van Hale—a mistake that sent your sister-in-law to prison. You don’t agree, I know, but can you play devil’s advocate with me for a minute?”

  Babs had been looking down at her lap too, Julia saw with compassion. Even if she’d somehow found the strength to stand up to her mother, even if some of her former meekness had changed to an independent toughness, she was still finding this conversation a strain. She looked up, and Julia realized that unlike her, Babs hadn’t been able to hold back the tears.

  “Devil’s advocate?” She reached for her purse on the chair beside her. She touched the handkerchief she took from it to the corners of her eyes and the reddened tip of her nose before tucking it away again in the handbag. “Go along with your assumption that someone else planted that bomb?”

  “Just for the sake of argument.”

  Barbara picked up a wedge of lemon and frowningly squeezed it on her salad. “All right,” she said reluctantly. “I suppose you want to know who else wanted my brother dead, Agent Ross. The answer is, take your pick.”

  She speared a curly leaf of endive and looked at Julia. “You could have told him that. Noel turned against Kenneth when he lost any say in the company. It wasn’t the money that meant so much to him—he received a seven-figure severance check, so he certainly wasn’t hurting financially—but he knew from that day forward Olivia would see him as the weaker of her two sons, and that shattered him. We all grew up trying to win her love, and only Kenneth succeeded.”

  She popped the endive in her mouth and chewed carefully. She swallowed. “Kenneth succeeded, but then he turned against her. I don’t know how much Olivia cared about that, but I know her first heart attack wasn’t brought on by stress. It was brought on by rage—pure, towering rage that Kenneth had managed to out-maneuver her with Tenn-Chem’s board and had forced her from the company.” She shrugged. “She shouldn’t have been so surprised. She was the one who’d taught him to go for the jugular in the first place.”

  “And you?” Max’s question sounded almost offhand, but at it, Julia saw Barbara’s lips tighten.

  “My brother saw m
e as a nonentity, Agent Ross.” Her voice shook and then steadied. “He wouldn’t have given a moment’s thought to my opinion of him.”

  “What about me, Babs?” Julia set her knife and fork neatly on one side of her plate, unable to keep up the pretence of eating any longer. “The official theory always was that I wanted Kenneth’s money without Kenneth. Noel thought I might have killed him to keep Willa from following in the traditional Tennant path of Hartley House, Olivia and Tenn-Chem. But what do you think my motive might have been?”

  “I don’t think you wanted to kill Kenneth, any more than I think you wanted to kill Robert or the pilot or Kenneth’s secretary,” Barbara said evenly. She held Julia’s confused gaze for a moment and then turned her attention back to her salad. She pushed aside a slice of radish before lifting a tiny half of a cherry tomato to her mouth.

  “I don’t understand. You just said you didn’t think I was innocent.”

  Julia waited as Babs finished chewing. The soft hands plucked at the linen square on her lap, unnecessarily pressed a corner of it to her mouth, and took a sip of water. Only then did the brown eyes turn her way.

  “I don’t think you’re innocent. But I don’t think your target was Kenneth, Julia.”

  Suddenly Barbara was the woman on the cliff again, and everything else fell away—the fussy mannerisms, the easy tears, the hesitant voice. Her eyes blazed with implacable hatred at the woman she’d once called her friend.

  “I know about the agreement you signed with Kenneth before Willa was born. I know you never really wanted to be a mother at all. I think when you planted that bomb your real target was your daughter—and I’m going to make sure you never see her again.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Thanks, Carl, I owe you one.”

  The phone in Max’s kitchen was a rotary-dial mounted on the wall by the refrigerator. Another example of time seeming to stand still in this house, Julia thought dully. As she watched him he went on with a constrained smile.

  “No, not the last piece of the puzzle by any means. But it helps.” He paused. “Yeah, it sounds like your part-time detective agency’s turned into a full-time job.”

  Julia stopped listening. Boomer came up to her chair and nudged her, and for a moment she felt like throwing her arms around the old dog and letting herself cry for as long and as hard as she could into the silky fur, but she merely stroked the glossy head with a shaky hand, taking comfort in the animal’s quiet presence.

  This time-standing-still thing sounded good, she thought leadenly. She’d be content to freeze everything a second before Barbara had thrown that terrible accusation at her. Instead, the moment kept repeating in her mind over and over again like some nightmarishly endless film loop.

  It was repeating right now.

  Her shock at what Babs had just said had been so great that she hadn’t even managed to put her protest into words, but at her gasp of horror Barbara had flicked her a cold glance.

  “You want her back? You want the money back, you mean. It didn’t work out the way you planned, did it, Julia? You thought you’d be sitting pretty—a fabulously wealthy young widow, able to indulge your every whim without any responsibilities at all. That’s the kind of life you were hoping for when you married my brother.”

  She’d picked up the lemon wedge and squeezed it on her salad again as if she couldn’t stand looking at Julia anymore, but her words had continued, far more caustic and stinging than the drops of juice falling onto her plate.

  “You signed your own daughter away before she was born. What kind of mother could you ever be to her after that?” She’d pressed her lips together tightly, and even through her own tears Julia had seen that Babs’s eyes were brimming over. “A child isn’t a pawn, Julia. A child isn’t a bargaining tool. A child is a precious gift—more precious than those obscene pearls you used to be so proud of, more precious than the diamonds and furs and trinkets that Kenneth used to drape you with. But you never saw it that way. Your whole world was ruined when she was born—you can’t deny it. Everyone saw the change in you, the way you just withdrew from everything. So you decided to wipe out both your husband and your inconvenient daughter at the same time, and then you expected to resume your exciting and glamorous life of parties and men and spur-of-the-moment trips to Paris. Instead, Willa was taken off that plane, you fell under suspicion, and in the end they put you in prison.”

  Max had broken in at that point, his voice steely. “Someone’s been filling your head with poison, Ms. Van Hale. You used to be Julia’s friend. Don’t tell me you came up with this insane theory all by yourself.”

  She’d narrowed her gaze at him. “Insane? Ask Julia how insane I’m being. Ask her about the paper she signed, giving away all rights to her daughter.”

  “He knows about that, Babs.” Heartsick, Julia had raised her eyes to the woman accusing her. “I made a terrible mistake, but believe me, I’ve regretted it ever—”

  “The only thing you regret is that Willa gets Tenn-Chem, and now you need her back so you can dip into the company coffers whenever you want,” Babs had said. She’d turned back to Max. “No, Agent Ross, I didn’t put this together all by myself. My mother and I don’t see eye to eye on most things, but when she told me what she suspected it all fell into place for me.”

  “She’s my daughter, Barbara. I’m her mother.” The words had felt as if they were being torn from Julia’s throat. “How can you believe I’d—”

  “I’m Willa’s mother now!” Her movements jerky, Barbara had reached for her handbag and abruptly pushed back her chair. “And I’m a better mother to her than you ever were—than you ever could be! Even if you’d never planted that bomb, Julia, do you honestly think you could have provided her with the happy childhood I’m giving her? You would have given in on sending her to Hartley House. You would have let Olivia take over her upbringing. It’s ironic in a way.” She’d stood, her slim frame shaking with emotion. “I wanted children more than anything else in the world. You had a child you didn’t deserve. Maybe justice was done in the end.”

  Julia felt a moist warmth on her hand. She blinked, and saw Boomer’s pink tongue come out again to lick her reassuringly. The dog had an almost human expression of worry on his face, and as she looked down at him he gave a puppy-like little whine and placed his silver-flecked muzzle on her knee.

  Time didn’t stand still, she thought, vaguely aware of Max hanging up the phone. Even the dog in front of her was proof of that. Tomorrow her daughter would celebrate her sixth birthday, and she wouldn’t be there with her to watch her open her presents, to see her playing with her friends, to hold her close and tell her how much she loved her. It was another milestone in Willa’s life she wouldn’t be sharing with her, and once gone, it would be as irretrievable as all the rest she’d missed.

  But as Barbara had said, maybe that was simple justice.

  “Noel lied about his role in Tenn-Chem.” Max pulled out a chair. “I just found out he lied about something else too.”

  “What?” Julia’s voice was toneless. He frowned.

  “Do you remember Carl Stein?” At her slight nod he continued. “About six months after he retired he realized he was going out of his mind with boredom, so he started picking up the odd investigating job here and there, and somehow the whole thing just snowballed.” He shrugged. “Anyway, after we talked with Noel yesterday I asked Carl to nose around Cape Ann, maybe flash your brother-in-law’s photo at the locals and ask if anyone remembered ever seeing him.”

  “Noel was never at the Cape Ann house,” she said without interest. “No one in the family was. Once in a while I’d take a run up the coast to check on things there, but it’s not much more than a cottage, Max, and rustic wasn’t Noel’s style. There’s nothing in a place like Cape Ann to interest him.”

  “Which makes it all the more curious that he went up several weekends in a row around the time of the bombing.” He looked at her, obviously expecting a reaction. She shifted he
r shoulders slightly.

  “Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was someone who looked like him.” Her tone was flat. “Or maybe I’m wrong and Noel thought he’d give the simple life a shot for a while. It obviously didn’t last.”

  “No, it didn’t last. But perhaps it only had to last long enough for him to use your cottage as a base of operations to construct a bomb,” Max said impatiently. “For God’s sake, Jules—don’t you see this could be the lead we’ve been looking for?”

  She stood up abruptly. “No, Max, I don’t see that. There’s only one thing I can see right now. Do you want to know what it is?”

  Not waiting for his reply, she walked stiffly over to the corner of the room, where she’d deposited her two bags of purchases when they’d arrived home. She reached inside one and pulled something from it, holding the object out to him as she came back to the table.

  “This is what I see, Max!” She gave the teddy bear in her hand a violent shake. “I see a woman who thought she could just pick up the threads of a relationship with a daughter who probably doesn’t even remember what her mother looks like anymore. I see a woman who thought if she bought her child a stupid bear that looked a little like the one she never got to give her two years ago, she could pretend that everything in between had never happened. I searched that damned mall high and low for this—this thing, Max!”

  She let the bear fall from her hand to the table, her vision blurring. “I don’t even know if she plays with stuffed toys anymore,” she said, her voice dropping to an agonized whisper. “Babs was right. I’ll never get Willa back. I don’t deserve to get her back!”

  He was on his feet and pulling her roughly to him. “Stop that,” he commanded unsteadily. “Stop it right now, Jules—do you hear me? We went through all this, and you know Willa needs to come home to you, whatever your sister-in-law said today. How can you give any weight to her opinion in the first place, dammit? She doesn’t know you at all—she never could have! If she did, no one would have convinced her that you could have put your child in jeopardy.”