Confessions Bundle

Mary Jane’s chin jutted forward. “She lied to you, Mom. I know she did. I heard her.”

She’d never seen Mary Jane so angry and hurt and scared all at once.

“When?”

The little girl’s eyes glistened. “When she told you she wasn’t talking to Hank. He calls here.”

Smiling gently, Juliet breathed a sigh of relief. “He calls, sweetie, but Aunt Marcie doesn’t talk to him.”

Marcie had told Hank that she’d call him when the baby was born and that she didn’t want to talk to him until then. Juliet suspected that her sister was afraid she’d give in and go home to Maple Grove if Hank pressured her hard enough. Hank, who was turning out to be surprisingly determined, still called.

Where had all that determination been for the past fifteen years when Marce had sat home night after night, unhappy and going nowhere?

She watched for the doubt to enter her daughter’s eyes, indicating that Mary Jane was considering another view than the one she’d held, followed by tentative hope and peace. She’d seen it happen many, many times in the little girl’s life.

Mary Jane’s arms were still clutched tightly to her chest, and her eyes remained hard, her expression adamant. “That’s what she’s telling you, Mom, that she’s not talking to him, but she’s lying.”

Juliet didn’t understand. Mary Jane had always been such a reasonable child. Even during her twos, when there were supposed to have been horrible tantrums, she’d usually been able to reason with the little girl.

“Did you hear Hank on the answering machine? Did he say something that makes you think Marcie’s talked to him?” Words to which Mary Jane had given wrong meaning?

It’s not that she doubted her sister for a second. She just wanted to fix whatever misconception Mary Jane was operating under.

The little girl shook her head, her full, angelic cheeks thinned with displeasure. “I heard her talking to him. And it wasn’t the first time, either, because she asked about something he’d told her a few days ago.”

It hadn’t been Hank. Marcie would have told Juliet about that. “Maybe it was Tammy. Or one of the other ladies she knew in Maple Grove.”

“She said our baby, Mom.” Mary Jane’s voice dripped with unfamiliar condescension.

The little girl was positive she was right and growing more frustrated with Juliet by the second, giving Juliet her first doubts.

“You shouldn’t have been listening to Aunt Marcie’s private conversations, honey.”

“She said that she was thinking about his questions,” the little girl continued, ignoring her mother’s admonition.

Questions?

“And that she really liked her job, but that it wasn’t like the shop. She missed her ladies and all the talk. And she asked about his mom and the hardware store and then—”

“Okay,” Juliet cut her off. Marcie had been talking to Hank. The rest of this she’d handle with her twin. “Enough. This isn’t any of your business.”

“Yes it is. She saw me.”

“She caught you eavesdropping?”

“No.” Mary Jane’s legs swung harder under the table. “She thought I was outside on the beach and she was hiding in the pantry talking really soft and I came in to get some bread to feed the seagulls and when I pulled open the door she saw me.”

“Does she know you’re mad at her?”

Mary Jane nodded.

Something else occurred to Juliet. “You heard all that just when you pulled open the pantry door?”

Mary Jane turned her head.

“Look at me, young lady.”

It took a long second before the child moved her head around, her eyes worried as they met her mother’s gaze.

Juliet didn’t say anything. She just waited.

“I got kinda scared when I came in and Aunt Marcie was talking in the pantry. I was afraid she was talking about me. Maybe to you. So I listened.”

“Eavesdropping is wrong.”

“I know.” Mary Jane’s full lower lip started to tremble.

Some pretty strong motivation must have propelled the little girl across that line.

“What on earth would Marcie and I have to talk about that would be so secret?”

“I don’t know.”

With a slight tilt of her head, Juliet silently gave the child a second chance to tell the truth.

“Blake.”

Oh. So all wasn’t as merry as she’d let herself think. On some level, she’d probably known that. Juliet never had been much of a Pollyanna.

“Mary Jane, you know I don’t keep things from you, especially when they’re about you. I’ve always been open with you.”

The child’s chin softened and sank to her chest. “I know.”

With her index finger, Juliet lifted her chin. “I said I’d let you know before I told Blake about you, and I will. That’s all there is to it.”

“But what if he asks and you like him again and I’m just a kid and—”

“You mean more to me than anything or anyone else in this world, young lady,” she said in a tone she seldom used with her daughter. “You come first. Always.”

Mary Jane’s eyes filled with tears and Juliet pulled the little girl into her arms, holding on for a long time. They’d been happy and contented for eight years. Why did it seem as if the world was trying to pull them apart now, when they needed each other most?

Or was it because they needed each other that circumstances seemed to be pulling them apart?

Something Mrs. Cummings had said back in March after the spitting episode came to mind, making Juliet uneasy. The woman had implied that her relationship with Mary Jane was too adult. Too open and equal to be natural. Juliet had completely dismissed her concerns at the time.

But could there possibly be truth to them?

Was that why everything seemed so hard? Because she expected more from a child than she should? Did she, because of Mary Jane’s ability to understand beyond her years, expect too much from the little girl emotionally?

Or was it as with everything else of great value—the better it was, the harder you had to work to keep it?

She didn’t know.

And that panicked her.

A lot.

BLAKE HAD NEVER DONE so much socializing. That last month before the trial, he accepted every invitation and hint of an invitation that came his way. Maybe, at least in part, he was driven by panic to get as much living in as he possibly could. Just in case.

However, he also wanted to see everyone he could, talk to everyone he could and meet everyone he could who might have known his father and Eaton James. Juliet had spoken to every single person on his list, turning up nothing of any substance, and he just didn’t know who else might hold the elusive piece of evidence that would gain him his freedom.

As he sat at the hospital Tuesday evening, enveloped by dread while he waited with a young woman he’d never met to find out if her husband was going to live or die, he wondered whether no one could point to that missing piece. What if his father and Eaton James were the only two people who’d ever known what had really happened between them? What if Blake would never know the whole story? What if there was no possible way to prove his innocence?

What if the father of the unborn child across from him didn’t live through the night?

“Do you have family in the area?” he asked the beautiful young Hispanic woman who hadn’t said a word since the doctor had left them to take her husband in for emergency neck surgery.

She shook her head, her features striking even though her face was stiff with tension. “They’re all still in Mexico. So far, Juan is the only one who got a visa to work here. They’re all trying, though.”

“Have you called them?”

With her hands slowly rubbing her belly, almost as though she didn’t even know what she was doing, she shook her head a second time. “If I call my mama, she’ll call his and I don’t want them to know when there’s no way for them to get here. No money.”

“How about friends?”

“We really don’t know many people yet. We haven’t been here that long, and with getting ready for the baby and all…”

He glanced at her belly and away. “How long before you’re due?”

“A month.”

That was how long he had left to wait, too.

But while he had to wait alone, young Maria Gomez might not have to. Blake excused himself, made some telephone calls, and within the hour was able to tell Maria that her mother, as well as Juan’s, had been wired money and—as was often the case in emergency situations—had been granted permission to spend a week in the United States. They’d be with her by the time Juan was coming out of recovery.

That was when the young woman started to cry. And as Blake sat there, holding a very frightened expectant mother, he prayed to a God he’d quit relying on sometime during his travels. He prayed for Juan and Maria Gomez. For their little baby. And for himself—a man ten years older than Juan Gomez, who’d never fathered a child and might never have a chance to do so.

Might the next month somehow find miracles for all of them.

Because, God knew, only a miracle or two would get any of them through the weeks ahead.

IF JULIET HAD ANY DOUBTS left about Mary Jane’s story, they were gone by the time the child finally fell asleep half an hour after her bedtime. Marcie had yet to leave her room.

“You going to hide in here forever?” Juliet pushed open the door to her daughter’s former playroom.

“No.” Marcie sat on the floor, leaning back against the wall, a tissue in her fist. Her eyes were red and swollen.

“You want to tell me about the conversation Mary Jane interrupted?”

Marcie did, immediately, confirming what Mary Jane had already told her and more.

“I’d like to be able to tell you I understand why you lied to me, and that I’m not hurt,” Juliet said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “But I can’t. I don’t understand why, if you really wanted to talk to Hank, you didn’t tell me. The decision is yours to make. We’ve both always known that. And I am hurt. Really hurt.”

Her twin’s lips parted, trembled. Tears slowly filled her eyes. The sides of Marcie’s hair were damp. She’d long since cried away any makeup she’d had on.

“I know.”

The admission didn’t heal the hole in Juliet’s heart. She’d accepted many challenges in her life—met most of them head-on—and come through stronger. She was prepared to face whatever else life decided to hand her. She’d just never expected Marcie to be the one doing the handing.

They’d come through everything together. Everything.

“Why?”

“I—” Marcie broke off. And that, more than anything, scared Juliet. Even now, face-to-face, there was a wall between her and her sister. She had no idea what to do with it.

“What, I’ve imagined the bond between us all these years? Imagined the trust?”

“No.”

She glanced at her sister’s bent head and wanted to scream. Or cry. “Then what?”

“I’m not like you, Jules, so sure of everything all the time.”

Juliet slid down to the floor, her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m not sure of anything.”

“Sure you are.” Marcie smiled, but the expression held as much sadness as anything else. “You got pregnant, and you knew just what to do. Oh sure,” she added when Juliet had been ready to interrupt. “You were scared, but you knew you couldn’t marry Blake, knew you shouldn’t tell him, knew you had to take the bar exam, and you knew that, eventually, you’d get what you wanted out of life.”

Okay. Maybe. She supposed. So why, looking back, did she remember a different kind of feeling—the feeling that she was losing the opportunity to ever have what she really wanted?

“I’m not sure, Jules.” Marcie’s soft, teary voice brought Juliet’s thoughts back to the bedroom.

And the fact that she was looking at the broken trust between her and the other half of herself. She and Marcie had always been able to talk to each other about anything. What had happened to change that?

“Okay, you’re not sure. That’s no reason to lie to me about talking to Hank. I didn’t ask you not to. Or even ask you if you were talking to him. You’re the one who came to me and asked me to filter the calls because you didn’t want to speak with him again until the baby was born. And being not sure is a reason to talk to me. Haven’t we always done that, come to each other, when we needed help?”

Marcie didn’t say anything, but the conviction in her troubled blue eyes told its own story.

“What?” Juliet asked. “At this point you might as well tell me.” She didn’t figure there was anything else Marcie could say that would hurt her more. She’d never understood, until that moment, how one could hurt too badly for tears.

They’d come. She knew that. Later, when she was alone in her bed.

“I didn’t think you could help me.”

“That’s crazy!” Juliet’s defenses were up, a first for her with Marcie. It panicked her. She didn’t know what to do. “Who better than me, Marce? I was in the same position you’re in right now. And I love you more than anyone in the world.”

“You don’t know that,” Marcie said. “You have no idea how much Hank loves me.”

So that’s what this is about. Two months ago, for the past fifteen years, Marcie had talked about the lack of fire between her and Hank, the lack of a feeling strong enough to get them to the altar. But now that she was pregnant, suddenly she was seeing things she’d never seen before?

Had it been that way with their mother, too? Had she known, before she got pregnant, that she and their father weren’t in love?

Was Marcie just like her after all? Another believer in fairy tales? Another woman looking for a man to take care of her? Another dreamer?

Another gray body lying naked in a tub, waiting for a daughter to come home? To dress it with shaking fingers to preserve an irrelevant modesty when the authorities arrived?

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Marcie said, and Juliet stared, wondering for a minute what her sister meant. “Hank doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“What does?”

She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know, but something forced her to sit there and listen.

“Mom.”

Marcie had read her mind, just like always. Under the circumstances, Juliet felt exposed.

“What about her?”

“You aren’t rational where all that’s concerned, Jules. You never got over it.”

“Of course I did. I went to counseling. Got on with my life.”

“You continued to live, but I don’t think you ever moved beyond it.”

Anger sped through her, giving her energy. Air to breathe. “You’re somehow going to blame the fact that you lied to me on Mom’s death?”

Marcie nodded and Juliet felt herself deflate. “You’re so afraid I’m going to end up like her, Jules, that you can’t see straight on this one. I know that. I understand. I love you for it. But I can’t tell you how I feel about this whole thing with the baby and Hank and Maple Grove. You just don’t get it.”

Marcie was wrong. She had to be. Juliet was the strong one of the two of them. She always had been.

“Are you saying you think I made the wrong choice when I was pregnant with Mary Jane?” she asked, trying to find even a small part of the anger that had driven her seconds before and given her a sense that she’d survive. “Because if you are, then this is not the first time you’ve lied to me. You’ve often said you completely agreed with me.”

“I don’t think it was the wrong choice,” Marcie said softly. “Not necessarily because getting married would have made you unhappy, but because you were so certain it would have. Because of that, there wouldn’t have been any other option.”

It was too much for her take in. After months of worry about Mary Jane, her renewed contact with Blake, the possibility that he could face life in prison, a case that was one dead end after another, and Marcie’s pregnancy, she just couldn’t process any more.

“What is it that I supposedly don’t understand?” She asked a question she thought she could cope with.

“That I might be able to be happy in Maple Grove,” Marcie said, her voice calm, growing stronger. “I hate the place. I have the same memories there that you do. But I do love Hank. All of this has shown me just how much.”

Marcie stopped, her hands still in her lap as she glanced over at Juliet, and the momentary conviction in her sister’s eyes gave Juliet more pause than anything else that had come before.

“I really thought that I wanted to move to San Diego,” she said. “For years, I’ve thought that. I’ve been dissatisfied, unwilling to give Hank any indication that I was planning to hang around. That he was enough to keep me there. But I didn’t leave, either. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”

Juliet knew why. The same reason her mother and grandmother before her had stayed. Fear to believe in anything more. Fear of leaving what little security was guaranteed to find out what the world could bring.

“It’s because I was too afraid not to want to leave,” Marcie said, making no sense to Juliet at all. “I was afraid that if I wanted to stay in Maple Grove, I’d be just like Mom.”

It made a very twisted kind of sense. Or was her sister merely justifying the very thing they’d both feared? That they were just like the two generations of women who had come before them.

“You expect me to believe now that you like Maple Grove?”

“No.” Marcie shook her head. “But I love Hank. And he loves me, too. Probably even more. He’s supporting me through all of this. He’s willing to wait while I work things out because he knows I need to do this on my own. To know for sure. But his life is in Maple Grove.”

“If he loves you so much, why can’t he think about making a life somewhere else?”

“I asked him the same question.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t know the answer.”

Life was never easy. And in the space of a few short hours, it had just gotten inexorably harder.

BLAKE WAITED at their usual booth in the little place out by Mission Beach for Juliet to arrive for their weekly meeting the first Friday evening in July—just three weeks before his trial.

Lucy brought over his whiskey as soon as he sat down. “Where’s Juliet tonight?”

“On her way,” he told the older woman. “She’ll have the usual.”

Lucy nodded, didn’t bother with her pad. “You having dinner?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll just leave these then.” She pulled a couple of worn black menus from the back of her waistband and plopped them down. “You don’t look so good, son,” she said as she was leaving. “Take that woman of yours on a cruise. You’ll both come back rested and raring to go again.”

Take his woman on a cruise. What an impossible thought.

But an intriguing one. A whole week alone with Juliet on the Mediterranean Sea. Fresh air. Sunshine. Cliffs older than time. History. Great food. And all night long for making love…

“Hi, sorry I’m late.” He hadn’t noticed her approach and she was already sliding into the booth before he could stand.

Probably not such a bad thing.

“Your drink’s on the way.”

Her smile was beautiful, as always, and mostly surface. He knew what that meant. The clock was ticking and answers weren’t appearing.

“Might as well get it out of the way,” he told her as soon as Lucy had brought her glass of wine.

She slid her arms out of the jacket to her suit. He hadn’t seen the yellow one before and couldn’t imagine many women looking good in it. On Juliet, with that fire-laced hair, the outfit was attention-grabbing. Or maybe it was just him. He seemed to find everything about her captivating.

“How do you know there’s anything to get out of the way?”

Infuriating. But captivating.

“Your expression, Counselor,” he said, bracing himself for whatever she might tell him. No matter how bad it got, he was not going to lose faith. It was about all he had left.

His faith, a room full of quotes that were daily reminders that the charges against him did not define him, and an attorney who was on his mind far more than was healthy.

Juliet took a pad out of her satchel. He’d noticed that while she always had that pad and a pen, she seldom used them.

“The worst news is there’s nothing to report from the Cayman Islands.” She looked straight at him. Pounded another nail in his coffin without flinching. He respected that about her.

“What else?”

Her smile was more genuine, if a bit sad. “We’ve been spending far too much time together if you know me so well,” she said.

With both hands surrounding his whiskey glass, Blake watched her through narrowed eyes. “I don’t think it’s a matter of time,” he told her.

In other circumstances he wouldn’t have been so forthright. But faced with the fact that he might not have all that long, the normal rules of social interaction just didn’t mean all that much.

She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t glance away, either.

“I think it’s a matter of recognition. The first night we met it seemed as though I knew you.”

She licked trembling lips, took a sip of wine.

“You think I’m nuts.”

“No.” She bit her bottom lip. “Not unless I’m nuts, too.”

Blake needed to kiss that bottom lip. And the top one, too. He needed to feel those breasts against his chest. To lose himself inside her again as he’d done endlessly that night so long ago. To be free to have another night like that one…

“I found something else this week.” Her voice cooled him off, though her eyes still bore that strange indefinable something that filled the space between them.

“What?” he asked. He’d had a long week, too, and didn’t want to hear any more about things he could do nothing about. Yet he needed to know everything if the facts were ever going to come together to expose the truth.

“Interestingly enough, as I perused the records of a couple of other Eaton Estates investors, I noticed outgoing payables in the exact dollar amounts that James was paying your father and that were being deposited in the Cayman Islands. We don’t know that the money was going there. It certainly wasn’t recorded that way. Still, just as with your father’s contributions to the Honduras charities, the coincidence is notable.”

“You think there’s a Ponzi scheme?” Had Eaton, like Charles Ponzi, used later investors to pay off earlier investors whose money he’d lost or confiscated?

“Possibly.”

Blake sat up, his heart beating a little faster. If they could prove something like this, he’d be home free.

“If nothing else, it at least means the money in the Islands could have come from any number of sources.”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t this great news?” It meant there were other places to look for the missing clue—some kind of proof that someone other than him had deposited money in that damn account. Some record of those same amounts of money leaving someplace else with no known destination on just the right days.

“It might be great news, but it makes the pool of possibilities that much larger when our window of opportunity is getting smaller by the day.”

Blake sipped his whiskey, in spite of the noose he felt tightening around his neck.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE SOUND OF CEREAL pouring into a bowl woke Juliet Saturday morning. Rolling over, she pushed the hair out of her eyes, trying to make out the numbers on the clock through sleep-blurred eyes.

Barely past six. If it were wintertime, the sun wouldn’t even be up yet.

Yawning, pushing past the lethargy that had claimed her limbs during the long night, she grabbed the terry shorts at the end of her bed and slid them up under the spaghetti-strap T-shirt she wore to bed.

Something had to give soon. She couldn’t afford too many more sleepless nights like the one she’d just had.

Worrying about Mary Jane. And Marcie. And Blake’s case.

And refusing to think about the feelings he aroused in her. Desires she’d long since convinced herself had been the result of too much alcohol and a desperate need to feel something besides worry and grief.