Broken Places (11 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

“Do you want something to eat?” Rachel asked Ben. “Did you have dinner?”

He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

Angie reacted the way Rachel hoped she would. Rising from the sofa, she said, “Well, I’m going to bring you something anyway. You need to eat.”

With Angie on her way to the kitchen, Rachel had only Brandon to worry about. He leaned against a wall in the foyer, looking casual and a little bored, but he never took his eyes off Rachel and Ben.

She spoke to Ben in a whisper. “Let’s go out on the porch where we can talk privately.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ben said, his voice loud enough to make Brandon snap to attention.

“Keep your voice down.” Rachel raised a hand to assure Brandon everything was okay. “Come on.”

She stood and waited until Ben heaved a sigh and rose too. “We’re just going on the porch for a minute,” she told Brandon. “I’ll be right back in, okay?”

Brandon didn’t look happy, but he nodded agreement.

Rain pounded the porch roof, drowning out the night sounds of crickets and frogs. A firefly, taking refuge from the storm, clung to the outside of the screen and blinked off and on, off and on.

Although security lights illuminated the yard beyond, the porch was dark, and Rachel could barely make out Ben’s features when he faced her. “I know you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Ben.”

“I hope to god they’ll find her alive somewhere,” he said. “I have to keep hoping she’s alive.”

“I’m hoping for that too,” Rachel said. “You know I am. But—Ben, is there something you’re not telling Tom? You think your mother did go to the Taylor house Friday morning, don’t you?”

Rachel heard the scratchy sound of his hand scraping over a day’s growth of chin stubble. “I’m pretty sure she did, yeah.”

“Why can’t you tell Tom that?”

“She wanted to pay off the Taylors, give them a big chunk of money, but I was afraid she’d just make the whole situation worse. Cam would’ve kept coming back for more. I’d never be rid of him. But I guess she tried it anyway. That had to be her car the neighbor saw.”

”She wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Rachel said. “Why not tell Tom?”

Ben inhaled a shaky breath. “If she’s still alive, I’m not going to help the police pin the murders on her.”

“What?” None of this seemed quite real to Rachel. But the murders were real. She had touched Cam Taylor’s dead body. “Ben, do you think your mother could have killed the Taylors?”

She braced for an explosion of anger over the question. It didn’t come.

Ben answered in a subdued voice. “She was furious about Cam trying to blackmail me. She didn’t let him see how mad she was, she laughed it off when she was talking to him, and she didn’t let Angie see it, but she was…
enraged.
She’s always had a temper, but I’ve never seen her that mad before. She was storming around here, saying she could kill Cam, who the hell did he think he was, she could throttle him with her bare hands—”

“Oh, Ben, that’s the kind of thing a lot of people say when they’re angry. It doesn’t mean she did it.”

“Tom Bridger would think that was exactly what it meant. And I don’t know what to think. I don’t want to believe she’s dead—but if she’s alive, where is she? What reason would she have to hide if she didn’t do anything wrong?”

They stood side by side at the screen, damp wind blowing against their faces. Rachel knew what it was like to suspect a parent was capable of something unspeakable, and she wished she could erase that suspicion from Ben’s mind. But she also knew how it felt to lose a parent, and she understood why he would rather believe his mother was a fugitive than accept that she had been murdered. Now that Karen Hernandez’s car had been found, Rachel felt certain she was dead, and she couldn’t produce any soothing words that would help Ben.

“I lied earlier,” he said. “I lied to you and Angie.”

His admission brought a stab of disappointment. Ben had been utterly convincing when he’d poured out his version of what happened in New York. “Are you saying that you—”

“Yes.” In the dark she heard Ben breathe in, breathe out. “I had sex with the underage girl who was posing for me. But it only happened three times, and I swear, at first I thought she was nineteen.”

“So you went on…seeing her after you found out she was a minor?”

“I don’t have an excuse, except that I was crazy and out of control. I’m ashamed of it. I never wanted you to know.”

Rachel swallowed to push down the bile that soured her throat. Ben had sex with an underage girl and bought his way clear of criminal charges. Cam Taylor had known the whole truth, and his wife had probably known too. Of course Ben feared them. Of course his mother had been afraid for her son.

Rachel had heard a lot of theories about the Taylors’ murders in the last few days, but she’d heard of no one with a stronger motive than Ben Hern and Karen Hernandez.

***

Abandoning the idea of confronting Lindsay right away, Tom turned toward home. He tried to shut everything else out of his mind and concentrate on navigating the flooded road, but he couldn’t stop himself from reliving every minute he’d spent in Hern’s house.

Tom had a gut feeling that Karen Hernandez was dead, she’d died the same day the Taylors did, but her son wasn’t sure, and he was withholding something, probably to protect her. The way Rachel blindly supported and protected Hern infuriated Tom.

Lightning flashed and thunder sounded in the same instant, jolting Tom out of his thoughts and forcing his attention back to the road. He could swear the heart of the storm stayed directly above him all the way home. It made him feel like that woeful character with the unpronounceable name who trudged through the old L’il Abner comic strip with a black cloud perpetually hovering over his head.

Tom had left lights on at home for Billy Bob, and as he approached the white clapboard farmhouse the windows shone bright and welcoming in the storm. He’d always hated coming home to a dark house. Something seemed wrong, though. He was sure he hadn’t left the upstairs lights on too, but now his bedroom window was lit up. Frowning, he turned into the driveway. Then he spotted Lindsay’s car parked at the end, next to the house. Had she broken in?

“God damn it,” he muttered. He parked behind her car, stepped into the rain, and charged up the front walk to the shelter of the porch. In the light cast by a fixture next to the door, he sorted through his keys, but before he could find the right one, Lindsay opened the door. Billy Bob stood beside her, wagging his tail.

“Oh, you’re soaking wet!” Lindsay exclaimed. “You poor thing.”

Tom pushed past her and slammed the door shut. “How did you get in here? If you broke a window—”

“Of course I didn’t break a window. Why would you think something like that? You need a towel. I’ll get you one.”

Lindsay turned to head off down the hall, but Tom grabbed her arm and spun her back around to face him. “How did you get in here?”

“I used my key, of course.” She pulled her arm free.

“You don’t
have
a key. You gave it back to me, remember?”

“Well…” She shrugged and wrinkled her nose, giving him an apologetic half-smile. “I gave back the original, but I’ve still got a copy I had made.”

“Why did you have a copy made?”

“You know, in case I lost my keys. You remember how I was always losing keys and Mom had to make sure we had extras. It’s just second nature to me by now, to make a copy of everything.” She added, “I didn’t realize I still had it until tonight. It’s not as if I deliberately held onto it.”

“I want it,” Tom said. He unbuckled his gun belt and stowed it on the shelf in the hall closet. “If you’ve got any more copies, I want those too.”

Lindsay’s silence made him turn to look at her, and he found her watching him with tear-filled eyes. “I can’t believe how hateful you’re being to me,” she said.

“And I can’t believe some of the things you’ve been doing,” Tom shot back. “I thought I knew what you’re capable of, but you’ve really outdone yourself in the last few days.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she cried, sounding more wounded than angry.

“What the hell were you thinking when you encouraged that lynch mob?”

“Lynch mob? Now I
really
don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That meeting was your idea, wasn’t it?”

Lindsay shook her head. “No. No, it wasn’t. They asked me to be there, but it was not my idea. Is it so hard for you to believe that people loved my parents enough to want their killer caught?”

“And you’re happy to point a finger at the person
you
want to see arrested.”

“Are you saying Ben Hern isn’t at the top of your suspect list?”

“Whether he’s a suspect or not is beside the point. I don’t have enough evidence to arrest anybody, and I’m not letting a mob push me into doing the wrong thing. You, of all people, ought to know how crazy it would be to move ahead without solid evidence.”

“I don’t control those people,” Lindsay protested. “I don’t tell them what to say or do.”

“No? Where did Beck Rasey get that stuff about Rachel?”

Lindsay’s blue eyes sparked with fury, and her voice trembled when she said, “It all comes back to Rachel, doesn’t it? If you listen to her, you won’t be able to tell the difference between the truth and a lie. Her whole life is a lie.”

“Give me a break, Lindsay. I’m not stupid, I can see what you’re up to.”

“Tommy, you have to listen to me, you need to know.”

He raised his hands. “I’ve heard enough from you.”

“Just listen to what I’ve found out about her. To begin with, she’s lying about her birth date and her birthplace. There’s no record of a Rachel Goddard being born on that date in—”

“Stop it. You’re not even making sense.” Tom strode down the hall to the kitchen, Billy Bob beside him. He reached for the dog’s water bowl, intending to fill it, but saw it was already full.

“I gave him fresh water,” Lindsay said from the doorway. “I took him out too, and I cleaned his feet and dried him off when we came back in.”

Tom brushed past her and headed up the hall again. He didn’t know where he was going. He ended up in the living room, staring out a window at the rain. He wondered if Rachel was out on the road now. Brandon would be right behind her, but if she tried to drive through standing water and spun out of control, Brandon couldn’t do anything to prevent an accident.

Tom was aware of Lindsay entering the room, pausing somewhere behind him. “The rain’s easing up a little,” he said. “You can leave now.”

“Rachel’s turned you against me completely,” Lindsay said to his back. “We can’t even be friends anymore because of her. What hurts the most is knowing how wrong she is for you. She’s going to hurt you, and I can’t do a damned thing to stop it.”

Tom turned to see Lindsay’s stricken face. “Don’t you get it? I want you to stay out of my life.”

She bowed her head, hiding her face from him. Her voice was sorrowful and so soft he barely caught her words. “Do you know how much I love you, Tommy?”

“Lin, don’t do this. You’ve got to let go, for your sake and mine.”

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you. There’s never been anyone else.”

“That’s not true.”

She raised her head to meet his eyes. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Yeah, I’ve seen other guys, even slept with some of them. There’s a guy in Roanoke who wants to marry me, believe it or not.”

“Maybe you ought to think about saying yes.”

“Tommy, I don’t
love
him! I’ve never loved anybody but you. I always thought we’d end up together. That was my dream from the time we were teenagers, marrying you and having three or four kids. But then you just walked away, moved to Richmond without me, and next thing I knew, you were engaged to somebody else. You broke my heart, Tommy. I almost didn’t survive that.”

The sight of her in tears because of him caught at his heart and shamed him. “Come on, Lin, what’s the point of rehashing it now? It’s late, it’s been a long day and we’re both exhausted. My head feels like somebody’s beating on it with a tire iron. I want you to leave now.”

She continued as if Tom hadn’t spoken. “After your parents and Chris and Carol died in the accident, I heard about you breaking up with that woman because she wouldn’t come and live out here in the sticks. Then you came back to me, and I thought you’d finally realized we belonged together. We’d get married and have a family. I waited
years
for you to ask me, but you wouldn’t even talk about it. You were just using me till somebody better came along. Rachel took you away from me before I even knew she existed.”

Tears poured down her cheeks. Tom knew he was making a mistake, but he went to her. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. As she wiped her face and blew her nose, he said, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I don’t blame you if you hate me.”

“I wish I could hate you.” She gave a sad little laugh. “But I can’t, that’s my problem. I just go right on loving you no matter what you do to me.”

“Aw, god, Lindsay—”

Then she was wrapping her arms around his neck, pressing her body against his. “Tommy,” she whispered, her breath warm in the hollow of his throat, “I need you. I feel so lost and alone without you.”

“Lindsay, don’t—”

She drew his head down to hers. Alarm bells clanged in his head, but his body responded to her touch, to her soft kisses on his neck. She lifted her head, murmured against his lips, “I’m so in love with you, Tommy. I’ll always love you.”

She pressed her lips to his as her warm fingers caressed the back of his neck. A soft moan escaped her, and he felt her tongue in his mouth, stroking his.

Something in him snapped.
This is insane.

He pulled her arms from his neck and pushed her away. “We’re not doing this. I want you to leave right now.”

The kiss had banished Lindsay’s tears and erased the sadness from her face, and she looked back at him with a gleam of triumph in her eyes. Her voice was soft, gently teasing. “Do you think I can’t tell when you want me? I know you, Tommy. I know your body as well as I know my own. You want me as much as I want you.”