A Time To Forgive

Connor stood speechless, shocked into silence by his niece’s onslaught of emotion. Jaye resembled a cornered, injured animal ready to strike out at anyone who tried to help her.

Abby crouched down beside the nine-year-old, her eyes steady on the girl’s face.

“So scared, Abby,” Jaye said between hiccuping sobs. “Couldn’t figure out how to buy a bus ticket. Walked here to the library. Nobody talked to me. So alone.”

“It’s okay, honey.” Abby smoothed the hair back from his niece’s despondent face and made soothing noises. “Connor and I are here now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Something thickened in Connor’s throat as he watched them—the innocent girl who’d been abandoned by her mother and the woman who refused to desert her guilty-as-sin brother.

But at that moment Abby Reed didn’t seem like the half sister of the man who’d murdered his brother.

She seemed like somebody who was on their side.

Dear Reader,

A Time To Forgive represents a departure for me. While many of my previous books were lighthearted, this one involves a ten-year-old murder and its lasting repercussions. It’s as much about hate as it is about the amazing power of love.

It’s also a book I’ve wanted to write for years, fueled by the tales of forgiveness I’d sometimes read about in the newspaper. Who hasn’t marveled at the people who ask judges and juries to be merciful toward the murderer of one of their loved ones? How, I wondered, could anyone forgive such a terrible crime?

In my book, Connor Smith faces a question that’s equally difficult. Can his love for the sister of the man who killed his brother survive the hate eating away at him?

I’m grateful to have been given the chance to write about the flip side of love—and the enduring truth that love is the strongest force of all.

All my best,

Darlene Gardner

P.S. Please visit me on the Web at www.darlenegardner.com.

A Time to Forgive

Darlene Gardner

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For those who can find it within themselves to forgive.

But even more, for those who can’t.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PROLOGUE

THE KILLER WALKED into the courtroom not with the shoulder-rolling swagger Connor Smith had expected, but with his head down, his eyes cast to the floor.

He was maybe five foot nine, not nearly as tall as Connor imagined he would be, and he was handcuffed and dressed in a prison-issue jumpsuit that was a garish orange. An armed guard stood on either side of him.

Connor gripped the armrest of his wooden chair to keep himself from surrendering to the impulse to leap from his seat and attack, reminding himself that the wheels of justice were about to turn.

He’d left the fragrant beauty of a sunny spring afternoon for a preliminary hearing in the austere interior of Laurel County District Court. Very shortly, the Honorable Preston A. Hodgkins would determine whether probable cause existed to believe the defendant had committed murder.

Judge Hodgkins wasn’t expected to do anything more than hand over the case to trial, yet the courtroom gallery was nearly full with members of the news media and spectators who had been shocked by the crime.

Connor didn’t pay attention to any of them.

He sat between his parents. He was peripherally aware of his mother clutching his surgically repaired right knee, which would probably give him trouble when he stood, and his father sitting stoically. But Connor’s eyes never left the killer as he shuffled to the defense table. Once there, he lowered himself into a seat beside the tired-looking public defender who’d been assigned to his case.

Connor waited, barely breathing, for the killer to lift his head. The newspapers had run his photograph a half-dozen times in the last ten days, but they used a police mug shot slightly blurred around the edges.

Connor wanted to see what evil looked like in the flesh.

The killer shifted in his seat, stared down at the table in front of him and stroked his forehead as though his head hurt. Finally, at long last, he raised his head, then briefly glanced at the gallery behind him.

His eyes were a startling blue, a fact Connor hadn’t been able to determine from the black-and-white newspaper photo. His face was pale and unlined, his mouth wide and almost gentle looking, his nose long and straight. His cheeks were apple-red and his dark hair freshly cut.

The killer’s name was Drew Galloway. Three weeks ago, he had turned eighteen, the age at which he could legally be charged as an adult.

Eighteen days ago, Galloway had plunged a knife deep into the chest of Connor’s seventeen-year-old younger brother and left him to die. A pair of teenagers had found J.D.’s body under the bleachers adjacent to the high-school football field where he regularly covered himself in glory.

The story was that the two boys had scuffled over a girl the day before and that Galloway had lured J.D. to the field to rid himself of the competition.

The night, Connor was told, had been black. He didn’t doubt that Galloway’s soul was the same shade.

Dressed in his prison jumpsuit with his cherub’s cheeks and sky-blue eyes, Drew Galloway didn’t look evil. A middle-aged woman with shadowy circles under her eyes and a teenage girl with long, dark hair and a tear-streaked face sat behind the defense table. Probably Galloway’s mother and sister, they furthered the illusion of normalcy.

Connor wasn’t fooled.

Galloway had not only robbed his brother of life, he’d stolen the heart from Connor’s family. Connor’s mother spent her days alternating between grief and rage, and his father walked around in a fog, barely able to function.

Neither parent had the energy to do anything about Connor’s sixteen-year-old sister Diana, who stayed out until all hours of the night, not caring that she was flunking out of school. Connor didn’t even know where she was right now.

No. His family would never recover from the loss of J.D. He’d been the family favorite, so full of life and athletic talent that he’d been headed to Penn State on a football scholarship. But today, when the judge upheld the charge of first-degree murder, the path toward justice would begin.

A bailiff commanded all rise and announced that court was in session. Judge Hodgkins swept in, his black robes flowing, and took a seat behind the bench. He asked counsel to state their appearances in the case of the state of Maryland versus Drew Galloway.

Connor sat patiently through the introductions. The only lawyer who mattered, in his opinion, was State’s Attorney Douglas Benton. A tall man with a head of prematurely gray hair, Benton was a descendant of the town’s founding father. Murders weren’t common in sleepy Laurel County, nestled in the state’s southwest corner less than an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, but the state’s attorney had a reputation for being as tough as a piece of white Maryland marble.

Judge Hodgkins shuffled some papers, then peered over his reading glasses. “I understand that the parties involved have reached a satisfactory plea agreement. I’ve reviewed the signed document. I gather you’re ready to proceed with a plea hearing and disposition. Is that correct?”

Douglas Benton stood. “That is correct.”

The bottom dropped out of Connor’s stomach as a murmur of excitement rushed through the crowd. A plea agreement? He turned to his mother and whispered, “How could this happen? Did you know about this?”

She stared at him, her face white, her eyes teary. Before she could answer, Judge Hodgkins pounded the desk with his gavel. “Order. Order.”

The murmuring died down and Connor watched with growing horror as Judge Hodgkins proceeded through a series of questions meant to make sure Galloway understood what he had signed. Finally, the judge reached the heart of the plea.

“This agreement specifies that you, Mr. Galloway, are pleading guilty to second-degree murder. It further states that the length of your sentence of incarceration should be twenty years, the first ten without the possibility of parole.”

The blood rushing through Connor’s body turned icy as the gallery erupted with shouts and angry murmurings. Twenty years, the judge had said. A chance at parole after ten. Galloway could be out on the streets as early as age twenty-eight. He would not rot in prison. But J.D. was already rotting in his grave.

The judge banged the gavel once more. “Order. Or I’ll have the bailiff clear the courtroom.”

Connor stared at his brother’s killer. Something that had been coiled in Connor’s gut unfurled, like the body of a snake venturing from the sunlight to the shadows. It reached out to every part of him, thick and sour and filling.

The emotion was so alien that Connor couldn’t identify it until it wrapped around his heart and dipped into his very soul.

Then he knew, with sudden and vicious clarity, what had cloaked his world in darkness and blackened his heart.

It was hate.

CHAPTER ONE

Nearly ten years later

CONNOR SMITH HAD SPENT the last decade attempting to outrun the past, but it caught up with him. Again.

The pattern was as familiar as the long, straight rows of gravestones in a cemetery. Just when he thought he’d relegated J.D.’s murder to a terrible memory and started to live in the present, something happened to pull him back into the abyss.

The latest something was his niece, Jaye, an unusually pretty little girl with pale blond hair swept back from the widow’s peak on her high forehead and gray-green eyes that were reminiscent of his dead brother’s. She’d got her first name from J.D., too.

The girl sat on a stool at the counter-height island in the kitchen nook of his Silver Spring town house picking at the piece of toast and jam he’d fixed her. Her skinny, nine-year-old legs dangled well above the porcelain-tile floor.

He stood between the island and the state-of-the-art black microwave that was built into his golden-maple cabinets, cradling his second cup of black coffee of the morning and waiting for a bagel to defrost.

On an ordinary Saturday morning, he’d already be at the office figuring out how to make one of his clients money. But there was nothing routine about a morning in which his sister chose to abandon her daughter.

“Where’s Mom?” Jaye asked.

There it was, the question Connor had been dreading. The microwave beeped, signaling that the bagel had thawed.

He ignored the summons and kneaded the throbbing space between his brows. He’d found his sister Diana’s note more than an hour ago but still hadn’t figured out how to break the news to Jaye that her mother had taken off for God only knew where.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Jaye asked abruptly in a hard voice that didn’t sound as if it belonged to a child.

“Yeah, she’s gone,” Connor said softly, futilely wishing he could soften the blow. “I think she needed to be by herself for a while.”

He expected Jaye to dissolve into tears, the way he imagined any young girl would react upon hearing that her mother had cast her off and left her with an uncle who was essentially a stranger.

Jaye’s chin quivered slightly, but her eyes were dry, her petal of a mouth pinched. “What’s going to happen to me?”

That was the question that had been swirling around and around in his brain since he’d read Diana’s note. She’d claimed she’d be in touch but made no promises about when she’d be back for Jaye. He doubted it would be any time soon.

Diana had nearly jumped out of her skin every time he’d asked her a question last night. He’d recognized that something was wrong, but had unwisely decided to wait until this morning to confront her about it.

He swallowed his anger at his sister and focused on the sad girl with the hard eyes. “Your mother left a note asking me to take care of you.”

How, he wondered, had Diana managed to look after Jaye for this long? She’d given birth less than a year after J.D.’s murder, when she was barely seventeen. She’d had sex with so many boys, she said, that she couldn’t figure out who the father was. Their parents, still drowning in grief over J.D.’s death, hadn’t been able to deal with a new blow.

After arguing bitterly with their mother, Diana had run off. Connor had spent a night and a day looking for her before their great-aunt Aggie had called to say that Diana had turned up at her house outside Roanoke in southwest Virginia.

There Diana had stayed for the next four years until Aunt Aggie’s death, when she’d cashed in her meager inheritance and simply taken off with Jaye. She’d called now and then to let the family know she was alive but hadn’t resurfaced until last night at ten o’clock when she rang the doorbell at his town house.

And now she was gone—again—but this time she’d left her daughter behind.

“My mom said I have a grandma,” Jaye continued, still in that tough, cold voice. “Maybe I should stay with her.”

“No,” Connor said. His mother could barely take care of herself, let alone a granddaughter. His father, re-married and living in Richmond, was only a slightly better choice. All his energy went to his second wife and their young son.

“Then where am I going to stay?” Jaye asked.

He looked around at the interior of his pricey three-story town house, which a maid cleaned twice a week until it sparkled. It was no place for a child, and he was a poor choice for a guardian.

He worked upwards of sixty hours a week at a high-powered brokerage firm in Washington, D.C., where he was so well regarded he’d recently been fielding offers from Wall Street. The rest of his waking hours, he spent at the gym or on the bar and restaurant scene with his girlfriend, Isabel Pennington, who’d been making noises about moving in with him.

He didn’t know anything about raising a child, especially one he wouldn’t have recognized as his niece until a few hours ago.

Though, for the moment, there was no other option. He was it.

He swallowed the lump of trepidation in his throat and strived to make himself sound self-assured. “I already told you that I’m going to take care of you. So you’ll stay here. With me.”

Jaye’s mouth flattened in a mutinous line, then she hopped down from the stool and shoved it so hard that it overturned. Without another look at him, she ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the guest room where she’d slept the night before.

Connor dragged a hand through the hair on his throbbing head. He made snap decisions involving tens of thousands of dollars every day, but he was lost in how to deal with a nine-year-old child. Should he follow her? Explain that he wanted her with him but had grave doubts about his ability to care for her?

“Diana, how could you do this?” he asked aloud.

The hell of it was that Connor didn’t blame Diana for abandoning her daughter. He blamed Drew Galloway.

Galloway hadn’t been in direct contact with anyone in the Smith family other than J.D., but the knife he’d thrust into J.D.’s chest had ripped the family apart. It had certainly precipitated Diana’s tailspin.

The hate that always simmered beneath the surface of Connor’s skin boiled up, nearly singeing him. Even though Galloway had been in prison for almost ten years, the killer was still leaving a trail of victims in his wake. The latest was the discarded little girl who pretended she didn’t want to cry.

Connor tamped down the surging hatred. He needed to focus on Jaye, not on Galloway. It was mid-February, more than halfway through the school year. He’d have to figure out which was the nearest elementary school and find out how to get Jaye enrolled. More immediately, he needed to visit the grocery store so the refrigerator contained something healthier than leftover pizza and beer.

Deciding to give Jaye time to get used to being stuck with him, he walked to the table and righted the chair she’d overturned.

He’d have a much tougher time righting the wrong that had been done to Jaye.

He had a fleeting thought of the teenage girl and the sobbing woman who had sat behind Drew Galloway that dark day in the Laurel County Courthouse.

Had Galloway’s family suffered even a fraction of the pain and the ramifications as Connor’s family?

Somehow, Connor didn’t think so.

ABBY REED WAS GOOD at spotting troubled children.

She should be. She’d lived with one for fifteen years until he’d been sent away for murder to the maximum-security Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center.

She’d had nearly ten years to come to terms with what her only sibling had done, but still couldn’t accept that he was a cold-blooded killer. In her gut she knew there was more to what had happened that night than had come to light.

Her heart bled for the boy who’d died and the people who’d loved him, but the Drew who used to read her bedtime stories while their single mother worked two jobs hadn’t been evil. He’d been a kid in trouble.

After the murder, hardly anybody in the small Maryland town of Bentonsville had agreed with that assessment.

Her mother had moved their family of three from inner-city Baltimore to Bentonsville two years before the boy’s death in a failed attempt to get Drew away from the potential to do wrong. After Drew was convicted, sentiment against him had run so high and so hot that Abby and her mother had had to move again.

They’d gone to Wheaton, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that was only fifty miles from Bentonsville but lacking in the acres of unspoiled countryside that had made the little town such a beautiful place to live. The trade-off, though, had been worth it.

Nobody directed hateful looks at them or pointed and whispered behind their backs.

Nobody recognized Abby as the frightened fifteen-year-old half sister of the boy who’d been labeled a murderer.

Nobody maintained that the sister of a convicted killer shouldn’t be hired to teach in the Montgomery County public-school system.

Abby had secured the job after graduating from Towson University with a major in music and minor in education. She spent the bulk of her time running the orchestra program at Blue Moon Middle School, but once a week taught a beginning class for fourth-and fifth-graders at the neighboring elementary school.

Montgomery County, with the nation’s capital on its southernmost border, was among the nation’s richest. The students Abby taught were largely the carefree children of privilege.

The fourth-grader in her strings class at Blue Moon Elementary was not happy-go-lucky. She wasn’t in the deep, dark trouble that Abby’s brother Drew had found himself immersed in, but trouble nonetheless.

Abby heard a new story about the girl every week. She’d splattered paint on the wall in art class, refused to participate in PE and wrote pithy sayings on classroom blackboards like School Stinks, Down With Learning and Reading Is Wrong. Considering she’d arrived at Blue Moon just four weeks before, it was quite a résumé.

Two weeks ago, she’d noticed the girl standing at the door to Abby’s classroom wearing a wistful expression. Abby had impulsively offered to work it out so she could take the class, even though in reality it was much too late to enroll.

After finding all the music stands overturned on the girl’s first day, Abby feared she was in for a long couple of months.

But then the girl had taken her violin from the case and followed Abby’s simple directions about how to coax sound from it. The violin had sung, the girl had been enchanted and Abby’s problems with the difficult child had been over.

Until today when she’d turned in a forged permission slip to hear an ensemble of National Symphony Orchestra musicians perform at the Kennedy Center.

She stood in front of Abby in the empty classroom, looking adorable in her pink Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and designer jeans. Abby handed her the permission slip.

“I know your father didn’t sign this so don’t bother telling me he did,” Abby stated.

The child looked down at her feet, which were encased in brand-name tennis shoes. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears when she gazed back up at Abby. “Am I in trouble?”

Sympathy rose in Abby like the Potomac River after a rainy season. The girl had recently confided that she’d come to live with her father after her mother had died. It wasn’t any wonder she wreaked so much havoc at school.

“You’re only in trouble if you don’t tell me why you forged the signature.”

“Because I really want to go on the field trip,” she said in a plaintive voice, sniffling not so delicately.

“Did your father say why he wouldn’t sign it?”

She nodded. “He says I don’t deserve to go because I’m bad.”

Abby bit down hard so she wouldn’t call the girl’s father-come-lately a cuss word. The nerve of the man. She supposed she should give him some credit for taking in his daughter after her mother’s death, but he shouldn’t have shirked his responsibilities in the first place.

“You’re not bad. You’ve done some things that are wrong. But you’re a good girl with a good heart. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

The girl blinked back tears, not inspiring much hope that Abby’s message had gotten through. “He doesn’t understand how much I want to hear the symphony, Miss Reed.”

Abby understood. Of all the students she’d taught in the four years since she’d worked in Montgomery County schools, this one loved music the most.

The child reminded Abby of her own young self. During the darkest times of her childhood, Abby had turned to the violin and let the music lift her soul. The music could fill a similar void in this child if only her hardheaded jerk of a father would let it.

Abby vowed in that instant to do whatever possible to gain permission for the girl to attend the field trip, even if she disliked what it would entail. “Would you like me to talk to your father, Jaye?”

Jaye Smith smiled, the misery on her face turning to hope. “Oh, yes, Miss Reed. I’d like that very much.”

CONNOR SMITH WAS NOT HAVING a good day.

It had started off on a sour note when Jaye had “accidentally” dumped his potted amaryllis onto the cream-colored carpet in his living room, throwing their uneasy morning routine so out of whack that she’d missed the bus.

He’d gotten snarled in traffic on the way to Blue Moon Elementary, causing him to deposit the silent-as-a-stone Jaye to school after the bell had rung. Then somebody had rear-ended his Porsche on the way to the office. And now one of his clients was talking nonsense.

“I think we should dump it, Connor.” The panicked, masculine voice belonged to a bank president who had trusted Connor with his investments for the past three years. “I checked the paper this morning and the price of a share is down eight cents.”

Connor leaned his head on the backrest of his office chair and stared at the white ceiling. He usually had more patience with Daniel Mann, who called every time the market fluctuated. This time he was panicking about an emerging pharmaceutical company in which he’d invested.