Summer's Freedom (22 page)

With a touching blush, he glanced at Maggie. “I’ve seen you,” he said. “Your mom hasn’t.”

“She doesn’t care,” Sam insisted, and glanced at her mother. “Do you?”

Maggie laughed. The sound was a little rusty in her throat, but it qualified as the real thing. “Of course I don’t. Come on, David.”

On the way up the steps, Samantha looped her arm through Maggie’s. “Guess what I got?”

“No telling.” Paul often sent Samantha home with wildly expensive gifts.

“A black-and-white enlarger of my very own. Dad said I’m good enough that I need to start practicing all the time.” The glitter in her eyes told Maggie that Sam knew the gift had been a balm to Paul’s guilty conscience—and that she didn’t mind in the least. “Do you think we might be able to rig up a darkroom someplace in the house?”

“I’m sure we can.”

As they went inside, Samantha hugged and kissed the others, chattering about her trip and the things she’d done. Her presence, Maggie thought, was refreshing. Even her appearance was cheerful—bright blue shorts and crisp white blouse. Her hair was fastened in a blue-and-white clip shaped like a butterfly. As she talked, she moved and bounced and laughed. For the first time in a week, Maggie felt the stirrings of life within her.

“So, how’s Joel?” Sam asked.

“He moved,” Maggie said.

Galen jumped into the conversation quickly. “Why don’t you get that fancy camera and show it off? We aren’t all together like this very often.”

“Okay.” She headed for the car, but not before flashing her mother a quizzical glance.

Maggie shifted to place a hand on her brother’s arm, giving it an unobtrusive squeeze of thanks. He patted her hand in solace, even as he laughed at some ribald joke Gram made.

* * *

That night, in spite of the whirl of activities Sam’s return home had inspired, Maggie couldn’t sleep. Long after the last creaks and whispers of the house had settled behind Galen and Samantha, Maggie stared into the darkness. After twenty minutes of that, getting nowhere, she crept downstairs for potato chips and beer, then watched two episodes of
Star Trek.

None of it helped. Her mind restlessly whispered with memories and visions she couldn’t quell, no matter how hard she tried.

She missed him—or rather,
them.
Mitchell, whose letters had always been a private, personal pleasure, and Joel, who had shown her the beauties of the spirit and flesh. Mind, body and soul, she thought. Between them, they’d satisfied the entire triad.

Jumping up, she strode to the tiny office off her bedroom and yanked open a desk drawer. There, neatly filed according to postmark, was every letter Mitchell had ever written. The first day of his betrayal, she’d considered burning them in a melodramatic gesture of fury. Now she was glad her saner self had won out.

Making a basket out of her nightgown, she grabbed chunks of letters until the drawer was empty, then carried them to her bed. There, she dumped them unceremoniously onto the quilt, scattering seven years of her life.

The envelopes were all decorated with painstaking beauty. There were animals and seascapes and trees, boulders and tiny flowers. As she examined them, she noticed two things she’d never seen before. Always the sky was deep and blue, like the sky over the Rockies on a clear spring day. And always, swooping through the heavens, was a bird.

Suddenly, she remembered the nightmare that had sent Joel, sweating, to the window for air. Just before he’d been torn from sleep, he’d cried out for the sky.

The memory pricked her heart. For the first time, she understood how difficult prison had been for him, how he’d mourned the loss of the open sky.

On impulse, she sifted through the dozens and dozens of letters to find the very first one he’d written to her. Slipping it out, she began to read his well-formed thoughts in the bold, slanting hand. This was the letter outlining the restrictions he needed her to agree to before they could write to each other. Maggie had forgotten how firm he’d been about it: no personal information at all. He didn’t want to know how old she was or whether she was married or if she had children. All he needed was a place to air his thoughts, someone to share those musings with.

The letter transported her back to the days of loneliness she’d experienced before her divorce from Paul. Mitchell’s letters had seemed a godsend at the time. He’d made her laugh with dry comments about the political scene, had made her think with sharp insights about the world. Each time the mailman had delivered one of his colorful envelopes, Maggie’s spirits, no matter how low, had lifted.

She’d forgotten that, how precious and tenuous the relationship between them had been in the beginning. Only time had solidified their need for the other’s thoughts.

With a pensive sigh, she refolded the letter, choosing another at random. When she finished it, she picked up another, then another and another, reading until dawn broke the night with gold fingers.

When at last she returned the letters to their drawer, her eyes burned with the reading, but one thing was clear. Before Joel Summer had ever appeared in her life, she had loved Mitchell Gray. No other person on earth had ever known her mind as intimately as he had.

Where that knowledge left her was less clear. In a way, she felt even angrier, for Joel had stolen Mitchell away, and Mitchell had been the most solid cornerstone in her life. The pen pal who didn’t judge, always listened to and honored her opinions in a way that no one else had in Maggie’s entire life.

Somehow, she realized as she made a pot of morning coffee for the house that had not yet risen, she needed to synthesize the two parts of the man she loved. Only then could she make peace with his past.

It was still so hard to imagine either side of him being capable of murder. Everything about him spoke of his respect and love of life in all its forms.

With a start of surprise, she realized she didn’t think he had done it. Could it have been Nina who’d actually killed the man?

Getting a little desperate, aren’t you? she asked herself with irritation. And maybe she was. She simply couldn’t imagine living her life without him—whichever
him
he turned out to be.

Nor could she see herself agreeing to love, honor and cherish a man who had been convicted of murder. What she needed, to make sense of all of it, was the critical, missing information. She needed to know what had happened.

* * *

It took some research, since Maggie didn’t know exact dates, just general time periods. In the library of the daily newspaper, she looked up first the wedding announcement of Mitchell and Nina Gray. It was simple and to the point, giving Maggie the information she needed: Nina’s maiden name was Hunt.

Next, she looked up the murder trial and worked backward to find the original police report, which simply stated that Mitchell had been taken into custody after a forty-year-old auto salesman had been killed under suspicious circumstances.

The trial reports held little of interest. By the time it had taken place, the city had grown large enough and violent enough that one murder trial was not much to write about. There was, however, one photograph that Maggie found electrifying.

Joel, his hair shorn into a severe cut, stood just outside the courtroom in a well-cut suit. His eyes, electrically blue even in a black-and-white photograph, were trained on the haughty woman walking toward him. Her heavy, dark hair swung in a bell around her shoulders. Maggie’s eyes narrowed at the expressions of the two principals, frozen for all time in the photograph. On Nina’s face was a definite smirk of satisfaction.

Joel’s face showed not the hatred Maggie would have expected, but an unmistakable mask of sorrow. Whether it was for the loss of this love or the loss of his freedom, Maggie had no way of knowing. She did know the expression pierced her.

She closed the book of newspapers, fingering the slip of paper with Nina’s name. The reason she’d come to the paper this morning was to learn Nina’s last name, with the vague aim of confronting her about the night of the murder. There was something odd about it, as nigglingly out of kilter as the demonstrations against Proud Fox had been.

In the end, she went to the courthouse and looked up the transcripts of the trial. It took hours to sort through the judgments and legalese, but Maggie finally found what she was looking for: Testimony from both Joel and Nina.

It was painful, she discovered, for she heard every word of Joel’s terse account in his rich, bass voice. A part of her ached for him, her gentle lover, in his moment of darkness, and she was acutely angry at Nina, who should have supported her husband in his crisis.

Instead, Nina’s testimony seemed designed to incriminate Joel even further. As she read, Maggie saw again the beautiful woman’s expression in the newspaper photograph—meanly triumphant.

By the time Maggie finished, her eyes were weary with nearly twenty-four hours of reading, and her neck ached from bending over the transcripts. She headed home with a whirl of thoughts spinning in her mind.

Galen and Samantha were just about to sit down to dinner, and Maggie joined them, but she was distracted throughout the meal. “I’m sorry, you two,” she said, carrying her plate to the sink. “I know I’m a million miles away, but I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“That’s all right, Mom. We understand.”

“Good,” Maggie said vaguely, and drifted upstairs and to sleep.

* * *

Joel spoke softly to a tiny screech owl, newly admitted and terrified. The bird’s yellow eyes were wild with fear and pain, darting from Joel to the hunk of meat in front of him. Joel chuckled quietly. “Go on, little one,” he coaxed. “It’s not what you’re used to, but I think you’ll like it, anyway.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a swath of honey-gold hair in the parking area. His heart squeezed and leaped simultaneously before he remembered that it wouldn’t be Maggie.

He’d been half seeing her in his peripheral vision for the endless, endless days since that morning in his bedroom. Any long-legged woman, any head of honey hair, any woman with Maggie’s firm, purposeful stride caught his eye, made his heart constrict until he could see that none of them was her.

A footstep in the gravel nearby made him look up, and for a second his heart stopped completely. This time, it really was Maggie.

She stood next to him, and Joel looked away. “If you had just trusted me, we could have avoided a lot of pain,” she said quietly.

“I thought we’ve already been through this,” he said, his voice reflecting his punctured hope.

“Not this part.”

He looked at her. “What part, Maggie? The murder?”

Maggie took a long, slow breath, stealing herself against his incredible beauty. In one week, her mind had erased some of the perfection of that face, and seeing it in all its glory proved more difficult than she had anticipated. “It wasn’t murder,” she said finally. “The charge was manslaughter.”

“Big difference, right?”

“I think there is.” She shifted in the gravel. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”

He rose from his squatting position. His jaw was hard. “You obviously know enough. Why don’t you tell me?”

This was a side of him she hadn’t seen. No emotion showed on his face, no translucent light shone in his eyes. This was Mitchell facing her—Mitchell, who’d learned to survive in prison. “You thought he was killing her,” she said.

He blew out a lungful of air, touching his chest in a vulnerable gesture. “Yeah.” His eyes focused high on the horizon. “She called me at work, terrified. We were split up by then, but I went to her rescue the same way I always did.” His fist clenched and lifted, fell impotently back to his side.

“When I got to her house, I heard her screaming. It scared the hell out of me. I ran up the steps and tore into the room—“He shook his head, licked his lips. “There was this ape in there, throwing her around like a rag doll. She had blood on her face and she was screaming, and something in me just broke.” He swallowed. “I didn’t mean to kill him, Maggie,” he said. His voice was subdued.

“What did you do?”

“Look at me,” he said, and now myriad emotions raced through his voice, which had risen in regret and remorse. He held up his hands in front of him, like a surgeon awaiting his sterile gloves. “My whole life I’ve been bigger than anyone around me, stronger than three guys put together. All the way through school, guys challenged me to fight so they could prove themselves. The coaches wanted me on the football team so I could mow down all the little guys playing quarterback and center.” He raised his eyes. “My dad always said, ‘Boy, you let them break on you. Don’t ever hit ’em back.’” He shook his finger as he imitated his father.

Maggie thought then there might be something she should say. But she needed to hear it all and remained silent to listen.

After a moment, he said, “So I always let them break on me. I didn’t play football and I didn’t fight. I had no idea what my hands could do to a man.” He paused. “I wish to God I’d never found out.”

It was impossible to check her tears then. She loved him too much to avoid feeling his pain. But with that first emotion, all the others she’d been holding back were released, as well.

Hearing her sob, he looked up. “Maggie…” he began.

“No. You listen to me now. I’m hurt because you didn’t trust me, not with your real self when you wrote to me and not with the other parts of yourself when you became Joel. Now I’m having a little trouble putting the two people together. I don’t know who I’m talking to or who I love.” Her voice broke and she furiously dashed away her tears.

“You and Galen keep talking about how necessary it was that you lie to me, that I wouldn’t have accepted you if you had come to me as Mitchell.” She straightened her shoulders. “Well, I have news for both of you—I would have welcomed Mitchell, because I already loved you. Now I don’t know what to do.”

He stepped forward, his hope blazing anew. She stepped back to ward him off. “I’m not ready yet, Joel—“she shook her head “—Mitchell. You see?” she cried. “I don’t even know what to call you!”