Authors: Ingrid Weaver
Tags: #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #Paranormal Romance, #Fiction, #Shadow, #epub
Delaney's Shadow (47 page)
“I served my time for what I did to Virgil, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep taking the blame for what he did.”
“Does this mean you’re going to get your case reopened?”
“Sure, why not? Give the professor something else to do. He might give me a half-decent defense if he finds out I’m innocent. Of part of it, anyway.”
“You’re what I’ve always said you were. You’re a good man.”
Max wanted more than anything to believe she was right, but it was hard to hope. It went against the lessons of a lifetime. It made something stretch and itch deep inside, and it
hurt ...
hurt ...
. . . as healing often did.
THE WAINRIGHT HOUSE WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY empty as Delaney lugged her suitcase down the stairs. No vacuum cleaner hummed in the dining room. Phoebe hadn’t come in today. The couple who had been staying here the night Elizabeth had been attacked had checked out early and gone home as soon as the police had finished questioning them. Helen had canceled the rest of her bookings for the next two weeks. Having violence essentially at her doorstep had disturbed her, and she was concerned about the safety of Phoebe and her guests. Above all, she worried about her granddaughter.
Delaney left her suitcase by the front door and went through the house to the kitchen.
The noise of a drill came from the backyard where Edgar was installing a lock on the garden shed. Metal rattled as his nephew propped an extension ladder against the oak to prune a dead limb. Max had spoken to them both before he’d agreed to leave her here to pack. Although it was broad daylight and he was only going as far as the gallery, he’d wanted their assurance they’d keep an eye on the place.
Helen was sitting in the breakfast nook beneath the window. A teapot rested on the table beside her elbow, and her hands were curled around one of the blue mugs with the marching geese. Her mouth was pursed tight when she glanced at Delaney.
Delaney slid onto the bench across from her. “Don’t be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad; I’m concerned. I wish you would reconsider your plan to move in with John.”
“I love him, Grandma.”
She added a spoonful of sugar to her tea and stirred vigorously. “It’s because I love you that I’m going to speak bluntly, Deedee. I’m not sure you know what you’re doing. You’ve been home for less than a month. You’re still recovering from a terrible accident and from losing your husband. You’ve only just learned the truth about your marriage. This isn’t the time to rush into another relationship.”
“Believe me, I’ve told myself all of this already.”
“Then don’t go.”
“He’ll be picking me up as soon as he’s finished at the gallery.”
Helen clinked her spoon against her cup.
“I lent him my car so he could take the painting the police ruined to have it officially appraised,” she went on. “He deserves to be reimbursed for its value. It’s not the money; it’s a matter of principle.”
“It’s fine to sympathize with his situation, Delaney, but don’t confuse—”
“I don’t just sympathize with him. I love him.”
“How could that be? You just met.”
This wasn’t the time to explain her history with Max. Helen might not believe how they first met. She certainly wouldn’t believe the other aspects of their relationship. Who would? “I feel it in here,” she said, tapping her forefinger over her heart. “It’s not anything like what I read about in fairy tales or what I talked myself into believing about Stanford. It’s not sweet. A lot of the time it hurts, and the strength of what’s between us is so totally encompassing that it can be frightening to regard head-on. He’s a complex man. It’s going to take me years to fully understand him. All I’m certain of is that we become more when we’re together than when we’re apart. What we have is . . . real.”
“It sounds as if you do feel deeply about him. That only makes me more worried.”
“Grandma . . .”
“Ada’s granddaughter works in the emergency ward at the hospital. She’s a nurse.”
The change of topic startled her. “Oh?”
“She was on duty the night Elizabeth was brought in. She wasn’t supposed to talk about this because it’s evidence in the police investigation, but she did tell her grandmother because Ada had been singing John’s praises since the festival, and she felt it was her duty to warn her.”
“What is it you’re trying to say, Grandma?”
“There was a welt on Elizabeth’s back. It might have been from the edge of the gatepost, but the police think she was hit with something like a belt after she fell.”
“And that’s why they assume John is guilty? That’s ridiculous. Ada’s granddaughter shouldn’t be spreading rumors, either. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that encourages vandalism.”
“If it turns out that he is guilty—”
“He isn’t. Trust me, John Harrison would be the last man on earth who would strike a woman. Ever.”
“He assaulted his mother.”
There was no need to go into this, either. If Leo did his job—and she intended to make sure he did—the truth would come out soon enough. “Grandma, you said you followed the case. You’re a good judge of character. Do you really believe he got a fair trial?”
Helen looked away.
It was a fitting response. How different would Max’s and his mother’s life have been if people hadn’t looked away?
“I only want you to be happy, Deedee. I can’t help feeling that you’re making a mistake.”
Her grandmother could be right. Trusting Max could be the biggest mistake of her life. Not because he might be guilty—that was simply inconceivable—yet she did have a poor record when it came to recognizing love. She and Max hadn’t spoken of their future—they hadn’t even spoken of tomorrow—yet she was already regarding this move as permanent. Maybe it was only sympathy she was feeling. Maybe he did want her only for sex. It was possible their relationship would fizzle as soon as the novelty wore off and life got back to normal.
Was it
normal
to experience sex from the inside out? Would she ever regard meshing their minds as routine? She closed her eyes and sought him. She sensed people around him, rectangles of color against a white wall and striped awnings outside a square window. He was still at the gallery. She trailed her fingertips down his arm. He responded with a quick squeeze. Pleasure as light as cattail seeds gusted across her mind.
normal
to experience sex from the inside out? Would she ever regard meshing their minds as routine? She closed her eyes and sought him. She sensed people around him, rectangles of color against a white wall and striped awnings outside a square window. He was still at the gallery. She trailed her fingertips down his arm. He responded with a quick squeeze. Pleasure as light as cattail seeds gusted across her mind.
“Are you all right?”
She pulled her thoughts back from Max’s, reached across the table, and took Helen’s hands. “You must have asked me that a hundred times since I came home. You’ve been more patient with me than I deserve. You’re the best grandmother in the world.”
Her lips trembled. “Watch it. I’m liable to ask for a raise.”
There was a knock on the back door. Delaney glanced past Helen to see Edgar through the window. She expected him to step inside before she remembered Helen had been keeping the door locked since the attack on Elizabeth. She went to let him in.
He pulled off his baseball cap as he stepped over the threshold. He held a stack of what appeared to be pamphlets in his other hand. “Found these in the shed,” he said.
Helen rose from the table. She frowned when she saw what he held. “Are those more Bible pamphlets? I’ve been finding one in my mailbox practically every day. Who would leave them in the shed?”
“Same joker who’s been leaving the empties, if you ask me.” He dropped the pamphlets in the blue bin beside the door. “Just as well you wanted me to put on a lock. Looks like someone helped themselves to a few of the tools—”
There was a yell from the backyard. Metal clattered as the ladder Pete had been using crashed to the ground.
Edgar was the first to run outside. Delaney followed with Helen on her heels. Pete lay beneath one end of the ladder. The pruning saw glinted from the grass beyond him. They were all focused on Pete. No one noticed the man who was standing behind the tree. They didn’t see him step forward, either. Edgar was kneeling beside his nephew when the blade of a shovel struck the back of his head.
It happened so quickly, shock kept them immobile for a crucial second. Then Helen screamed. Delaney grabbed her arm, spun her toward the house, and started running with her. She didn’t have the chance to take more than two steps before the shovel connected with the backs of her calves and she fell.
Instead of running away, Helen flew at the man. He knocked her aside like a gnat and drew the shovel back to take another swing at Delaney.
Horror blurred her vision. Pain slowed her reflexes. She had no time to do more than raise her arm to shield her head from the blow. In the split second before it hit, the image of her attacker seared across her brain.
This made no sense. He was a complete stranger. A pale, sickly man with thinning hair and drooping jowls. His eyes were lifeless black that glittered with the kind of madness she’d seen in her dying husband.
Yet that wasn’t the only reason he seemed familiar.
THIRTY
DELANEY WOKE TO THE SMELL OF PAINT. SHE WAS LYING on her side on a hard surface. Her arms were angled so far behind her back, her shoulders burned. Her wrists were bound. She couldn’t feel her hands.
In spite of all that, relief crashed through her mind. The force of it stole her breath. She inhaled frantically, but the air she drew in was ripe with turpentine fumes that singed her nose and the back of her throat.
The relief was followed by a flash of white-hot fury.
I’m sorry, Deedee
.
I’m sorry, Deedee
.
It was Max. Those had been his feelings that had flooded her head. She reached to absorb his thoughts. Tenderness engulfed her. The pain in her shoulders eased. So did the aches in her arm and the backs of her legs.
An image of the shovel descending replayed across her mind, along with a burst of something too deep to be called simply pain. Max reined in both fast and trembled another apology across her thoughts.
Where are you?
Where are you?
She opened her eyes to a blur of color. Her head throbbed. She blinked, and the blur resolved into painted canvases that were stacked against a white wall. The wooden legs of an easel stood less than a yard from her face. Her sight confirmed what her other senses had already told her: she was lying on the floor of Max’s studio.
Hang on, I’m coming.
Did you see?
I saw everything.
The throb in her head got worse. She saw the face of her attacker once more, the sagging jowls, the pale skin . . .
Other images superimposed themselves over the first. The man’s undershirt was splotched with stains. It stretched tight across his belly. The sickly sweet, yeasty smell of beer hung on his breath and oozed from his pores . . .
Blood pulsed from his nose. She felt her knuckles crack and satisfaction race through her veins as she punched him again and again . . .
His hair was thinner. The belly had wasted to only a drooping pouch. The ravages of cancer had hollowed his cheeks and carved circles beneath his eyes.
Yet Delaney knew exactly who he was. The outside might have changed, but not the essence. She recognized that part from what she’d experienced in Max’s memories.
Virgil Budge wasn’t in prison. He wasn’t dead. He had returned to Willowbank.
Scattered details moved into place. Phoebe’s creepy guy in the woods. The open door of the garden shed, the gate left ajar. How long had he been here? What else had he done?
She thought of her grandmother. Edgar and Pete.
In reply, Max sent her an image of the Wainright House as it had been when he’d arrived there moments ago. His desperation tinted the scene orange and blurred the edges, yet she was able to see it. An ambulance was parked in the side yard. Helen was on her hands and knees in the backyard beside Edgar. Her hair had come loose from its pouf, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. She was yelling at Pete to keep still as paramedics lifted the ladder from him. One of his legs was broken—bone protruded from the skin—but he was trying to drag himself toward his uncle. Helen staggered upright when she saw Max. She told him someone had taken Delaney.
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