Night Moves : Dream Man/After the Night Read online

  “Now?” Monica asked, startled. “Where?”

  “Just out.” He was as restless and fractious as a stallion who could scent a mare in season, but couldn’t get to her. His blood was throbbing through his veins, urging him to action, any action. He felt as if there should be a violent thunderstorm brewing, but the weather was calm, and the lack of thunder frustrated him. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back. We’ll get to those papers tomorrow, Alex.”

  Baffled, worried, Monica watched him stalk out of the room. She chewed her lip some more. It sounded as if Gray was getting increasingly involved with the Devlin woman. She couldn’t understand how he could do it, after all the misery her family had caused. And Michael had been out to her house! Monica didn’t want him anywhere around Faith Devlin; those Devlin women were like spiders, spinning sticky little webs that trapped the men unwary enough to wander into their vicinity.

  Alex shook his head, his own eyes worried. “I’ll go say good night to your mother,” he said, and went upstairs. Noelle had retired to her own sitting room not long after dinner, pleading fatigue, but the truth was that she was simply more comfortable upstairs.

  He stayed up there for half an hour. Monica was still sitting in the study when she heard him coming down the stairs, his step slower than when he had gone up. He came to the door and paused, looking at her. Monica’s head came up and she stared at him, stricken. His hand went to the light switch. Monica froze in dread, her breath clogging in her lungs, as he turned out the light.

  “My dear,” he said, and she knew the words were spoken to the woman upstairs.

  • • •

  Faith prowled the house, unable to interest herself in either reading or television. Despite her insistence on staying, she was more disturbed than she wanted to admit. She had to force herself to go into the kitchen, the memory of that box on the table was so strong. It was a relief to see the table bare, to find that the association faded as she made herself a skimpy meal. Skimpy or not, she could only eat half of it.

  She called Renee again. She knew it was too soon, but some faint, long-buried instinct made her reach out to Mama, not so much in search of comfort but because there was a link between them beyond kinship: the Rouillard men.

  To her relief, Renee answered. If her grandmother had answered, Faith knew that Renee never would have come to the phone.

  “Mama,” she said, and was disconcerted to hear her voice shake a little. “I need help.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then Renee said warily, “What’s wrong?” Motherly concern wasn’t a natural response for her.

  “Someone left a dead cat in my mailbox, and I’ve gotten a couple of threatening notes, telling me to stop asking questions or I’ll end up like the cat. I don’t know who’s doing it—”

  “What kind of questions?”

  Faith hesitated, afraid Renee would hang up on her. “About Guy,” she admitted.

  “Damn it, Faith!” Renee yelled. “I told you not to be nosing around, but would you listen? No, you have to stir shit up, and now the stink’s gettin’ too bad for you. You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t shut up!”

  “Someone killed Guy, didn’t they? You know who did it. That’s why you left.”

  Renee’s breathing sounded over the line, harsh and rapid. “Stay out of it,” she begged. “I can’t tell, I promised never to tell. He has my bracelet. He said he’d blame the killing on me if I ever told, he said he’d put the bracelet where it would look like Guy and me had had a fight, and I’d killed him.”

  After the weeks of suspicion, of sifting through old rumors and continually coming to dead ends, to suddenly hear the truth was startling. It took Faith a moment to recover from the shock, to absorb it.

  “You loved Guy,” she said, her own conviction ringing in her voice. “You couldn’t have killed him.”

  Renee began to cry. It wasn’t noisy sobs, designed to gain sympathy. Her tears were betrayed by the sudden thickness in her voice. “He’s the only man I ever did love,” she said, and Faith knew that whether or not Renee really had loved Guy, she believed she had, and that was enough.

  “What happened, Mama?”

  “I can’t tell—”

  “Mama, please.” Desperately Faith searched her mind for a reason that would mean something to Renee. It would take a lot to overcome her mother’s basic self-interest, and in this case, Faith couldn’t really blame her for looking out after number one. The only thing that had ever been greater than Renee’s self-absorption had been her greed . . . “Mama, as far as everyone is concerned, Guy is still alive somewhere. He hasn’t been declared dead, so that means his will hasn’t been read.”

  Renee sniffed, but the word “will” caught her interest. “So what?”

  “So if he left anything to you, it would be in his will. You could have had a lot of money coming to you all these years.”

  “He always said he’d take care of me.” A whining note of self-pity entered Renee’s voice. She took a deep breath, as if to calm herself, and Faith could almost hear the decision being made.

  “We met at the summerhouse, as usual,” Renee said. “We’d already . . . you know. Done it. Anyway, we were lyin’ in the dark talkin’ when he drove up. We didn’t know who it was, and Guy jumped up and grabbed his pants, afraid it might be one of his kids. He didn’t never worry about his wife none, because he knew she wouldn’t care.

  “They went out to the boathouse to talk. I could hear them yellin’, so I put on my clothes and went down there. Guy opened the door and came out just as I got there. He stopped and looked back, and I’ll never forget, he said, ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ That’s when he was shot, right in the head. He fell on the grass, there in front of the boathouse. I was on my knees beside him, yellin’ and cryin’, but he was dead when he hit the ground. He never even twitched.”

  “Was it Gray?” Faith asked, agony in her tone. It couldn’t be. Not Gray. But she had to ask. “Did Gray kill his daddy?”

  “Gray?” A startled note sounded through the tears. “No, not Gray. He wasn’t there.”

  Not Gray. Thank you, God. Not Gray. No matter how she had told herself that he couldn’t have done it, there must have been a hidden reservoir of doubt, because she felt a sudden relief, a lightening of spirit.

  “Mama—Mama, no one would believe you shot Guy. Why didn’t you go to the sheriff?”

  “Are you kiddin’?” Renee gave a sharp laugh, which ended in a sob. “People in that town would believe anything about me. Most of ’em would’ve been glad to see me arrested even if they knew for certain I was innocent. Besides, he had it all figured out—”

  “But you didn’t even have a gun!”

  “He was goin’ to kill me, too! He said he’d put the gun in my mouth and make me pull the trigger, his hand over mine, if I didn’t promise to leave and never come back, and never say nothing about it to anybody. He’s strong, Faithie, strong enough to do it. I tried to fight him and he hit me, I couldn’t get away—”

  “Why didn’t he kill you, then?” Faith asked, trying to make sense of why a murderer would deliberately let a witness go.

  Renee couldn’t answer for a moment, she was crying too hard. Finally she gulped, and regained shaky control of her voice. “He—he didn’t mean to kill Guy, he was just so damn mad, he said. He didn’t want to have to kill me too. He told me to go away, and he t-took my bracelet. He said if I ever came back, he could make it look like I’d killed Guy, and I’d get the death sentence. He can do it, you don’t know him!” Her voice rose shrilly on the last sentence, and she dissolved once more into wrenching sobs.

  Faith felt her own eyes burning. For the first time, she felt pity for her mother. Poor Renee, without education, influence, or friends, with all her wild living and lack of responsibility, had been a prime target for anyone who wanted to make her a scapegoat. She had seen the one man she cared for, the man she was depending on to make her life easy, shot to death