The Hiding Place (17 page)

“Sit and have some coffee,” she said, indicating a tray she had already laid out on the glass coffee table, which was surrounded by an oversize, horseshoe-shaped, ivory leather sofa. “I know you would have loved to have seen the children. I’m going to have them make get-well, we-miss-you cards for their grandmother the moment they get back. So, why have you graced me with a visit after all this time? Oh, I know it works both ways, but three children and a husband and social duties—well, you remember some of that, don’t you? I often wonder what you can recall.”

“Too much sometimes and not enough other times,” Tara said.

Susanne shifted in her seat as if she were poised on something hot or sharp. “It’s so lovely,” Susanne said, pouring two cups of coffee from a sterling silver carafe, “that you have a daughter of sorts now.”

Why, Tara scolded herself, did everything Susanne Lohan say annoy her? Even when she was playing the perfect hostess, smiling and chatting, it was as if a chilly mountain breeze blew from her.

“It’s been a wonderful experience to have Claire, especially after my personal loss,” she told Susanne.

“You mean losing Laird.”

As she took a sip of coffee, Tara leveled a long look at Susanne over her coffee cup. The woman couldn’t sit still. Which meant nothing too dire, of course. Lowering her cup on her knees, Tara said, “I mean Laird and the other.”

“The other? Oh, little Claire’s mother.” Susanne so obviously heaved a sigh that Tara almost reached out to shake her. Why had she seemed relieved to come up with that? Was there something else she didn’t want to reveal?

“Claire’s mother, yes, but my other loss, too,” Tara said as the awkward silence stretched out between them.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Susanne’s cup rattled in its saucer and she put it down. “Tara, I hope you didn’t come here so we could play Twenty Questions. Are you fishing for answers about how Laird’s doing?”

“Knowing Laird, he’s doing just fine. Hale, hearty, happy and hellishly self-centered.” The words burst from her. She’d realized she was hurt and upset and angry, but she hadn’t come here to unload on Susanne, for all that. Tara put her cup down, too, and rose to leave. She couldn’t stay another minute. This was a bad idea, all around.

“You know, don’t you?” Susanne asked.

Rather than ask what she meant, Tara decided to take a risk. “Yes, Susanne. I know.”

“It just happened. You can’t blame them,” she blurted, her hands fluttering in her lap. “You didn’t really want to devote yourself to Laird anyway—I could never understand that, and neither could she. I know you feel betrayed, but don’t take it out on me! So how did you find out about him and Jennifer?”

“Is he bankrolling her now? He tried to buy her off, didn’t he?” she demanded, before the real import of the words sank in.

“What?” Susanne cried, clasping her hands around her neck as if she’d choke herself. “I thought you meant you learned that Laird married Jennifer DeMar, your doctor—that’s all.”

Tara sank back onto the sofa. “That’s all?” she heard herself echo. For a moment, all the fight drained out of her. She felt like a fool. Betrayed but stupid. Laird had bought Jen off, all right. He’d done more than bankroll her to keep her silence about a dead baby—he’d rolled her in the hay!

She’d called Jen more than once since she’d been out of the coma, and the witch hadn’t let on. Everything fell together now, how Jen had politely tried to distance herself…even the man’s voice in the background on the phone. And no one had told her. Or had Veronica tried to?
Jim’s not lost, Angel? Jen’s not lost?
No, not lost at all, but with Laird, whom she’d always had her eye on and now had her claws in.

“Tara, I’m sorry to spring it on you like that, but I thought you meant you’d figured out that Jen’s not in Los Angeles, but Seattle.”

Jen’s not lost, Angel…Jen’s not in Los Angeles?

Tara had always felt a certain sense of triumph in putting puzzles together, but this one had turned tragic. She stood up and walked toward the front door with Susanne scurrying behind her. Tara was so shocked, so hurt, she wanted to strike out. The Lohans might claim they were trying to protect her fragile feelings about a lost child, about her health, but it was all to cover for Laird and his new wife. If the first wife couldn’t deliver a live child, maybe the second one would.

“I hope you won’t lose Lohan points for having told me about Laird and Jen,” Tara clipped out. “You’d better hope she doesn’t have a boatload of sons to split your and your children’s cut of the Lohan fortune. My good fortune is that I’m out of here, in more ways than one.”

Before Susanne could get to the door, Tara opened it, then slammed it. But she knew what she’d just said wasn’t true. One way or the other, she still had Lohan doors to kick open and not just about Jen and Laird.

I
t seemed so natural for Tara to hug not only Claire but Nick when she got home. She was still shaking.

“What’s the matter?” he whispered.

“Later.”

“No, now. Claire will be okay with Beamer for a sec.” He turned around and raised his voice, “Honey, will you play with Beamer since he’s been alone all day? I need to talk to Aunt Tara for a minute.”

“Oh, sure,” Claire said with a little smile. “Can we go outside?”

“Not right now. Stay in here, and we’ll be right back.”

They went into Tara’s office and closed the door. Her phone message light was blinking, but that was not unusual. She ignored it.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Just a surprise—a shock. My former sister-in-law let spill that my former husband ran off to Seattle with Jen DeMar, my ob-gyn and once-upon-a-time friend. They’re married. I’m assuming that’s what Veronica was trying to tell me—Jen’s not in Los Angeles. She probably thought if she told me that indirectly, her husband couldn’t blame her and I could track her down.”

“They ran off together while you were comatose?” he asked as he put his hands on her shoulders as if to prop her up. “Hell, it sounds like they deserve each other. Did the caretaker say anything about that?”

“No, but he said that sometime in February, when I was supposedly in the depths of the coma, he found me wandering the clinic grounds in the snow. And that I told him I was looking for a hiding place.”

“It’s not much, compared to keeping the lid on a secret pregnancy, but maybe the clinic’s trying to cover up that you got out when you were under their care, or that you were not actually comatose as long as they claimed.”

Her head snapped up. “They did use sedatives freely there. They said it was to delay my coming out of the coma too soon to recover well. I’ve always accepted that, but does that make sense? Maybe it was to protect Laird and his lover, give them time to clear Colorado—or time for me to recover from a miscarriage or bad birth outcome.”

“Did your sister-in-law say anything about your having been pregnant?”

“No, but I didn’t ask her directly. I was going to, but when she blurted out about Laird and Jen, I lost it and walked out.”

“I can imagine.”

“Besides, maybe she didn’t know everything. Maybe I was lucky to have stumbled on that much. By their acts of omission—not telling me about delivering a child—the Lohans could all be lying. Nick, I just don’t know what to think. Maybe after my baby died, Laird hated me even more, so he turned to Jen…oh, I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

She burst into tears. He pulled her to him. “Sorry,” she murmured against his shoulder, trying to get control. “I—if you and Claire leave soon, I don’t know what I’ll do. Except,” she said as she pulled away from him and got a tissue from the drawer, “I’m not letting up on the Lohans until I get more answers. I’m going to get in to see Veronica. I don’t care if they have that place locked up as tight as Fort Knox. If that doesn’t get me answers, I’ll go to Jordan and to Laird. If I bore a child, I have every right to know all about it—whatever pain it causes Laird or me. I have every right to visit my child’s grave over the years!”

“Of course you do. If they’ve kept something like that from you, it’s wrong—warped.”

“Somehow that sounds just like them.”

After dinner, when Claire had been put to bed and Nick was walking Beamer outside, Tara finally got some time in her office. She checked her e-mail and was relieved to see she had no return messages from Marv Seymour. Good, she thought. He must literally have gotten the message. But had he been their lurker?

She also checked online to try to trace Dietmar Getz’s movements. His Web site stated that he’d come in fourth in the race where they’d confronted him. His next race listed was in Utah next weekend. That could be to throw her off, of course, because he was still the front-runner for her stalker. And that left him time to still be hanging around here. She typed up a quick list of why she felt Getz was more likely than Seymour to be after her. She was going to leave keeping an eye on RickWhetstone to Nick.

She turned to her phone messages. The machine was still blinking behind her and she hadn’t thought to listen to them first. Two were from clients desperate for updates, one from a possible new client, whom she’d call tomorrow, and the fourth one—

“Ms. Kinsale, Jim Manning here. There’s one thing I thought I’d better tell you. I forgot about this. I think the reason you might be mixed up about your having a baby—’ sides the fact you seemed pretty out of your head that night in the snow, and you know how some of those meds they give out screw up people’s minds—is there was a rumor kinda like that.”

Tara bolted straight out of her chair. She leaned on her desk, staring at the answering machine.

“I mean,” Jim’s message went on, “not a rumor about you, but you probably overheard it and got mixed up. I heard a nurse say that people hear things while in a coma sometimes. So, anyway, I heard from a custodian sometime that winter that a wealthy patient had delivered a child that died somewheres on clinic grounds, and the clinic wanted it all kept hush-hush. I didn’t see nothing myself, but you know them and their clients—no publicity. ’Sides, the clinic could get themselves sued, I s’pose, ’cause the baby died. You know, like they didn’t take the person to a regular hospital in time. Anyhow, thought you should know that’s prob’ly where you got so mixed up…”

Tara sank back in her chair, put her face on her knees and grabbed handfuls of hair.
You got so mixed up…
That could be part of it. Maybe she did overhear something like that. After all, she thought she recalled hearing organ music in her coma, and now she knew why. So maybe she thought she heard something about a baby. But what about two doctors telling her she’d been pregnant, possibly to full term, and had had a vaginal delivery? And why did those last two words haunt her? Had she heard someone tell her she was going to have a
vaginal delivery?
Or was she going completely crazy?

She went to the front door to call Nick in to hear the phone message, but she heard voices. A woman’s shrill tones? Someone shouting, as if she were hearing her own inner screams.

Tara saw a car had pulled up in the driveway. A woman got out. It was dark, but in the wan glow of houselights, Tara could see spiky blond hair and the glitter of something bright on her back. And Nick was holding her, or at least, the stranger was hugging him.

His arm around the woman, who leaned against him as if she could barely stand, Nick brought her up toward the house; they went in the door to the lower level. Tara closed the front door and hurried down to meet them.

“What is it?” she asked him. “Who—”

“Marcie Goulder, a friend of Rick Whetstone’s. You know, who I visited last Friday. She says Rick committed suicide this morning.”

Tara’s hands flew to her mouth; she gasped. “That’s terrible! I’m so sorry,” she told the woman, who merely nodded.
But,
Tara mouthed to Nick behind Marcie’s back,
why is she here?

Nick just shook his head and led Marcie up the stairs into the great room. Tara noticed she was really built and might be pretty; her face was so ravaged with grief that Tara couldn’t tell. Her running mascara had made dark half-moons under each eye. She wore tight jeans thrust into boots and a denim jacket embroidered with a starburst of gold and silver sequins on the back. One of the threads had broken, and an occasional sequin dribbled off as if she left a trail of glitter. Nick sat her on the sofa where she put her head into her hands and moaned.

“Marcie has no family, and Rick had only Clay,” he told Tara. “Since I had stopped by to see him and was family, she thought I should know. She tracked me down through my last name in the Conifer phone book.”

Tara was thinking that the woman could have called, but the poor thing was obviously distraught. In Marcie’s condition, it was amazing that she’d found her way safely way up here in the dark. Tara had comforted many bereft women, but this one had loved the brother of the man who had killed her best friend, Claire’s mother—and Nick’s sister—so why did he have to be so solicitous?

“I’ll get her some water,” Tara volunteered.

“Yes, that would be good,” he said. “And Beamer’s still outside. The crazy dog jumped in her car, so I closed him in there rather than letting him run loose.”

Tara brought Marcie a glass of water, and, with a nod of thanks, she sipped it.

“Sorry to crack up like this,” she choked out. “I just couldn’t stand being alone in the place where he did it. He overdosed on pills I didn’t know he had. No warning. I thought things were good. He was earning money, we had plans. Left me a note on my computer, which the police took—the whole PC, I mean. And it’s brand new. Gotta check out suicides, I guess.”

“Yes,” Tara told her, “that’s standard procedure. But if he left a note, they’ll just take a look at the computer, then give it back.”

“I read the note,” Marcie said with a sniff. “It said he was gonna kill himself, but not exactly why. Just overwhelmed, nothing to live for. Damn, ain’t that a kick in my pants. They’re gonna do an autopsy—regulation, they said. Hate the idea of that. Ugh!” She took a big swig of water. “I blame myself in a way, ’cause I had no idea—no idea he was so shook to do something like that. Listen, I’m sorry to bust in like this, but I had nowhere else to go. Couldn’t go to the L Branch where I work, not with everyone talking, and Nick seemed so nice when he dropped by.”