With Every Breath (42 page)

but in the end, they accepted it. For her sake. And that was so astounding, such a stroke of luck, that I went with it. How could I ever turn away from marrying such a beautiful woman from such a good family?"

"B-b-because you didn’t 1-1-love her," Maddie managed. He looked bemused. "Love? I was twenty-one when I met her. It was time, in those days, to get married. She wanted me, and she risked a great deal to have me. She had money, and I had a dream." His face drew into a self-deprecating frown. "A small dream. To connect Candle to the mainland. To be the one who finally managed it. Dierdre’s money made it possible. She gave that to me, and I owed her a great deal in return.

"I think Dierdre and I would have been fine, for a long, long time," he went on. "We would have shared a pleasant life. But then, on the ferry one day, there by the bottom railing, stood your mother."

Maddie lost his gaze. It moved away from her and became distant. "She wore a yellow dress with narrow little straps," he went on. "It was summer, and her hair was bleached light by the sun. It was very long. She was beautiful. And then she turned away from the railing, looked up at me, and she waved. She was so young.

"She told me later that she liked my eyes. That they were honorable and industrious. I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I liked it. And I loved her. Oh, how I loved her. With her, I knew that rare, special feeling that I don’t believe many people ever get the chance to experience. I certainly had never experienced it with Dierdre, no matter how much I wished I could."

"You had an af-f-f—" Maddie finally broke off. She didn’t know why it bothered her so, but she still couldn’t say it. Maybe because it had destroyed and tortured so many lives.

"Of course we did. She knew I was married. But she was happy.
And I honestly think that happiness could have kept her going forever, if she hadn’t eventually had someone else to think about."

"Me," Maddie choked.

"You," he agreed. "It was for Annabel that I bought the house over here. It was because of her that I began staying on Candle overnight when the last ferry of the day came this way. It worked so well. Dierdre was on the mainland. Annabel and I had ample time together, at least until Dierdre got suspicious and hired another boat to bring her over here one night. Beyond that, nobody ever guessed. And Dierdre certainly wasn’t going to make it public knowledge. We were very circumspect. Annabel said people knew she was in love, but not with whom. And it became a game for her, to outwit them, to never let them catch on. It was such an incredible gamble, the way the islanders love to gossip. But do you know, I think she triumphed. To this day, I’ve never heard any rumors about us. But then Annabel became pregnant."

"You c-c-could have left Dierdre," she accused. "You c-c-could have married my mother."

"I tried."

Her heart slammed. She hadn’t been expecting that.

"Annabel held true happiness for me. I would only ever be complete with her. But Dierdre wouldn’t let me go. Refused to contemplate the shame a divorce would have brought upon her. She lived well. She had caught her bad boy. She couldn’t bear having people know that her bad boy had tossed her over for a bad girl—a Wick girl, no less. Even on the mainland back then, that was something of a stigma." He shook his head.

Maddie’s head hurt. "So she killed her?"

"A divorce would have been far, far too ugly, and in the end, as Annabel always guessed, I was too honorable. I had made a vow, a promise, and I had taken something from Dierdre—the money and several years of her youth. I felt that I simply had to give something in return. All I could give was to live up to my word, my promise, ’til death do us part.

"Annabel would not go on the way we had been, not with a child in the picture. I told her that I would take care of her. I told her that I would always see that you were taken care of. She would never lack for money, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t care about money. She just wanted respectability, for your sake." Maddie could tell by his eyes that he still didn’t understand that. She ached inside, for him, for her mother. For herself.

"So she said she didn’t want to see me again. She said we had to end it suddenly, fast, like a bandage coming off. It was the only way she could stand it. Shortly thereafter, I heard that she had married a Wick boy— Beacher Brogan. It was a simple thing for her to marry. A good many men wanted her. She was ... special.

"She said you would have a normal life. A good life. A legitimate life. She wouldn’t have you grow up with the stigma of being a bastard child, a mistake.

"It should have ended there, but it didn’t," Harry went on. "You were born too soon to be Beacher’s child, and he was cruel. He took it out on both of you. He loved Annabel, too. I have no doubt of that, or I couldn’t have stood it at all. What he did, he did out of love. Out of a crazed, desperate need to possess her. But he couldn’t possess her, not really, because you were hers, and you were the child of another man. So he beat her, and he beat you, but she stayed, never missed a step, kept to it. Maybe she was punishing herself."

"She p-p-punished me,"
Maddie croaked. "
I
s-suffered."

"No. Oh, no. No more than she could prevent. You were only around Beacher at all on the weekdays, when you were in school, and he was mostly out on the boats then. She made sure that you had limited exposure to him. She told me so once, when we met in the diner, maybe as much to reassure herself as me. She took you over to the mainland on the ferry on the weekends, when there was no school and Beacher was about. I could see you then, on the ferry, though I always stayed up on the pilothouse deck and I never spoke to either of you. I will always believe that she planned those trips as much for my benefit as yours. She was like that."

Maddie reeled. She had thought that those trips had had something to do with her mother’s lover, and, in a way, they had.

Oh, Joe. She needed him then. She needed him desperately. She veered for the door.

"Madeline."

"No," she choked. "I don’t want to hear any more. I understand. Enough."

"Do you?"

"Dierdre killed her because you couldn’t let go."

"No, I couldn’t. Not as long as you were both showing up on the big island with bruises and breaks."

"I don’t want to hear it!"
She whirled back to him. "She died for this, Harry. She died,
and she was my mother, and now you’re asking me to keep this to myself?"

"I’m asking you to think about it. Leave here, and think about it. Think long and hard about the lives that would be changed irrevocably, after all these years, if you started talking now. And for what purpose? Your mother worked so hard to keep this secret."

"I don’t want to leave! And goddamn
those lives! I didn’t change them! The secrets were your
choices!"

She waved a hand wildly. "Yours, and my mother’s. Not mine, Harry. I was just... I was just a b-b-bystander." "You have to go away from here," he repeatedly doggedly. "At least for a while."

For the first time she heard a certain, real intensity in his tone. She wondered if it was what had attracted her mother.

"You’re not safe here," he went on. "There is someone else involved. I don’t know who. But there is. And they’ve been helping me."

"Helping
you?" She looked at him incredulously, her head pounding.

"I don’t understand it, but I know you’ve got to go." She shook her head frantically.

"Come back, if your heart is here," he agreed. "But let your foe Gallen figure it out first. Take your son. Go away. Be safe. That was all I ever tried to do—make sure you were safe."

She looked wildly out at the porch for Dierdre. She could no longer see her head. "Leslie knows," she blurted. "Yes. I saw her that day. After you ran."

She looked back at him. "Did you lock the door?" she demanded.

He didn’t answer.

"Did you lock the door?"
she screamed.

"No."

Someone else had, then. Someone else. And all she remembered was Harry and the blood and the gun. And her mother’s poor, broken body.

"I’ve got to go," she whispered. "I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to find Joe."

"Madeline."

She looked at him.

"You’ve stopped stuttering. It’s over."

"No," she moaned.

"Press charges if you like. I’ll deny everything I’ve just told you. So will Dierdre. There can be no physical evidence tying her to the crime now. There are no bodies. And I’m all you remember. You cannot accuse Dierdre, because you never saw her that day. You were not in the house when she did ... what she did. You came in afterward."

"You’re protecting her from having killed
someone!" Maddie cried.

"Because it was my fault that she did. Because she couldn’t share me, couldn’t bear the shame."

"No," she repeated, and backed for the door. She had to find Joe.

And then her hand was on the knob and she was almost there, almost free, almost away from this nightmare, and she thought of something else. She looked back at him.

"Did you kill Rick?"

He met her eyes evenly. "Are you sorry?"

Maddie closed her eyes, feeling faint. It was true then. Rick was dead.

She looked at Harry again. "Did you do it?"

"I would have. I’d intended to. So you could leave here."

"Would have?"

"I believe he was already dead when I got here."

Oh, dear God. Someone else.

"I shot him to be sure that he most certainly didn’t get up again. He would have killed you, Madeline. At the very least, he would have tried to take your child, to hurt you no matter where you went or where you tried to hide. Sooner or later he would have found you. And I wanted to be able to control the situation when he did, and get rid of him so you could leave. I’d promised Annie. I promised her I’d take care of you."

"You’re Steve Singleton," she breathed.

He nodded once.

"You put that ad in the papers so Rick would answer it, so you could tell him where Josh and I were!" Such twisted care, she thought wildly, enraged. Such dangerous protection. "You could have gotten us killed!"

"No. I was ready for him."

"So where is he?" she cried. " What did you do with him?"

Harry shook his head. "I certainly don’t have him. I don’t know."

Maddie turned and fled. She stumbled out onto the back deck. There was no sign of the woman with the black hair and the hot eyes.

She had to find Josh and Joe. She levered herself over the railing, into the dunes. Was he still on the beach, or had he come back to the center of The Wick? She didn’t know which way to go. She called for him. And heard a gunshot.

She spun around, her heart hammering. Where, oh, God, where? And who? Had Dierdre shot Harry? Had Harry shot Dierdre? No, it was distant. Then her fractured thoughts made some sense of it. The shot had come from the beach.

She ran around the house, clawing her way up the biggest dune on the north side, scrambling and running.

She had nearly made it to the road when something hit her from behind, hard enough to drive the breath out of her in a single burst. Then there was another blow, almost absurdly gentle, against the side of her head even as she went down. She tasted sand, and then there was only darkness.

Chapter 35

Sheila was talking to one of the guys from the county about the mess up on The Wick, taking notes to pass on to Joe. She had the phone tucked against her shoulder, and typed as the man spoke. She repeated everything back to him to make sure she had it right.

"You’re going to send an official report over, right?" she asked finally. "I mean, I’ll pass this on to Joe, but—" She broke off as the radio began buzzing.

"I’ll have him call you if he has any questions," she finished quickly.

She hung up and went to the radio. She grabbed the handset and pushed the receiving button, and got static, then a humming sound. She pushed the transmitting button to talk back to whoever was calling in.

"Hello? I’m on. It’s Sheila. What’s going on?"

" Hummmmmmm."

Whoever was on the other end couldn’t hear her. They’d have to let up on the black button and press down on the red one to receive her voice. They couldn’t

be doing that because she kept getting a steady drone of static from the other end, along with that hummmmm. Her skin began to crawl. It wasn’t one of their cops. "What’s going on?" Kenny Halverson asked.

Sheila gasped and jumped, startled by his voice in the doorway. "I don’t know. Something’s wrong. Somebody’s on one of the radios, somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing."

"Let me try." He attempted to send, but just kept receiving, as had happened to her. "They’ve got us blocked out."

"Hummmmm ... ahhhh
..."

"What the hell?" he muttered.

Sheila was getting frantic. "I’ll go to Joe’s radio and see which one I can’t raise, Hector or the Pathfinder. I sent Hector out to find him, and he hasn't come back yet. They’re both out somewhere." But before she could take a step, something different happened.