Holly Read online

  “Sure,” Holly said as she slipped into the dressing room. As soon as she was in decent clothes again, she planned to go to the library. Maybe Nick would still be there.

  For a moment she looked at herself in the dressing room mirror. She had on white underwear, lacy and nice, but not exactly set-a-man-on-fire. Between her breasts lay the necklace Nick had given her. What had he said? He liked the display case.

  Maybe instead of going to the library she’d go shopping. About fifty miles away was a huge shopping center. Maybe she’d see about buying some new underwear. For Lorrie, she told herself. For Lorrie.

  Once on the street, Taylor snapped open her cell phone and dialed a number from the memory. It was answered on the second ring.

  “If you want her, you’d better get down here,” Taylor said, then waited. “I really couldn’t care less about what I’m sure is your very interesting and unique sex life. Something is going on with her and I don’t like it.” She paused. “If I knew what it was, I’d fix it. I think it has to do with that guy who cuts the grass.” Pause. “No, she’s not having sex with him. She’s a prude. She—Good Lord! You might be right. Maybe he’s the one she—” Taylor cut herself off. “If you want to save that rotting old house of yours, I suggest that you get down here now!” She snapped the phone closed, then smiled at the memory of her stepsister in that awful bridesmaid dress. Dear, sweet, lovable, rich Holly, she thought. Holly, who everyone loved, who everyone adored. Holly, who had been given everything all her life.

  Still smiling, Taylor looked through the restaurant window at her fiancé Charles and waved. How much do I hate thee? she thought. Let me count the ways. Smiling more broadly, she went inside.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT WAS AFTER DINNER AND HOLLY WAS IN HER bedroom. Her parents were in the sitting room downstairs, watching a movie on the TV, and Taylor was in her room talking on the phone to someone.

  Holly was cutting the price tags off her many new sets of underwear while watching the driveway for lights from Nick’s truck. It was already after nine, so where had he been all afternoon? She knew he wasn’t driving that monster truck he’d had in the garage when she’d met him, but was his beat-up old truck secretly a racer? Had he met with other truck-racing people and started placing bets? Was he now in the backseat with some girl with four feet of black hair and hoop earrings six inches in diameter?

  She told herself to get a grip. She had no right to be jealous. No right—

  She broke off because she saw Nick’s headlights coming down the long drive. Hastily, she shoved her new underwear into the shopping bag and pushed it under her bed. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide anything, but if Taylor saw, she’d tease Holly a lot.

  Quietly, Holly tiptoed down the stairs, grateful to the people who’d restored the house that the steps didn’t creak. She slipped out the kitchen door, down the stairs, and across the lawn to the tiny house where Nick was living. By rights the house should have been given to Roger and Phyllis, the couple who’d taken care of her parents for over twenty years. But a year ago, after James Latham had called Roger at 3:00 A.M. four nights in a row, they made new rules, one of which was that they would live off-site.

  She saw the back of Nick disappear into the little house, a grocery bag in each arm. She went to the truck, hauled out two more bags, and went to the house. She met Nick on his way out again. She saw his surprise, then his look of pleasure, then the way he tried to look emotionless.

  “Out for a walk?” he asked.

  She held the back door open for him. “Out to find out if you discovered anything.”

  “Maybe,” he said, setting the groceries on the counter. He began to put them away.

  The kitchen was tiny and there wasn’t room for two of them, so Holly sat on the countertop. Shamelessly, she stretched her bare legs, exposed by her short shorts, across the doorway to the other counter.

  “Like maybe what?” she asked, picking up a package of rice and pretending to read the label.

  Nick took the package out of her hand and put it in the cabinet. “So what’s this all about?” he asked, nodding toward her bare legs. “You want me to scratch your itch while your boyfriend’s out of town?”

  Holly started to pull her legs up, but made herself stay where she was. “So what’s put you in a bad mood? Get a librarian who wasn’t interested? Or did you make a pass at some motorcycle chick and she turned you down?”

  “None of the above. Could you move?”

  Holly hesitated, but Nick was frowning so deeply she pulled her legs up to let him pass. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked as he left the kitchen.

  “I’ve been wrestling with my conscience,” he said over his shoulder as he went down the hall to where there was a bedroom and bath.

  Holly got off the counter, went into the little living room, and looked about. It was as she remembered the building, nothing interesting or special about it. Marguerite had furnished it prettily, with a sofa and chairs and a few knickknacks that wouldn’t fit into the main house.

  But there wasn’t one item in the room that was personal to Nick. There were no photographs, no souvenirs, no books, not even any magazines.

  Nick came into the room, slipping a T-shirt over his head. “So what do you want?” Turning, he went back to the kitchen.

  What was wrong with him? She stood in the kitchen door and watched as he opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. She went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and pushed him to sit down at the little two-seat table in front of the window. “You talk and I’ll make you a six-egg omelet. Deal?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said with a grudging smile. He took a beer out of the ’fridge, opened it, then sat down at the table and watched her as he started talking. “The story wasn’t exactly as you told me. First of all, Jason’s trial and hanging were in a town a hundred miles from here.”

  “A hundred miles?!” She broke eggs into a bowl and began to mince onions and green pepper.

  “As far as I could tell, Arthur was worse than we thought. An early newspaper account said that Arthur had begged to have the trial moved to another town so Jason would be sure to receive justice.”

  “Because people in Edenton knew the victims?”

  “That’s what was reported, but one newspaper said the victim was ‘notorious’ for his dishonest scales. Half the men in town had threatened to kill him and his wife since she worked with him.”

  Holly stopped chopping and looked at Nick. “If that’s so, then it makes no sense to move the trial. The defense attorney could have put lots of people on the stand to swear that they, too, had threatened the victim.”

  Nick sipped his beer. “Wait. This gets better.”

  “You like mushrooms?”

  “Sure. The newspapers reported that Jason was very relaxed during the trial. In fact, one time he fell asleep and the judge bawled him out.”

  “He wasn’t worried about four witnesses against him?”

  “Apparently not, but then his three lawyers—”

  “Three!”

  “Yeah, three attorneys and two assistants. They made mincemeat of the witnesses. It was dark, they’d been drinking, and their characters weren’t of the best. This was before a person’s past criminal record was inadmissable in court, so every crime those four had been involved in was told to the jury.”

  Holly mixed the eggs and dumped them into a hot skillet lavished with butter. “So that left Arthur’s testimony to get his brother off.”

  When Nick didn’t answer, she looked at him, saw that he was frowning. “What’s upset you?” she asked.

  “I believe in family loyalty. It’s something my family thinks highly of. We’ve always believed—” He took a breath and looked at her. “Jason could sleep in the courtroom because he knew his brother would get him off by telling the truth. But when Arthur got on the stand he started crying and said he couldn’t lie, that Jason had not been with him that night.”

  “And the