Diedre stood on the front steps of the stone mansion and hesitated. "Should we ring the bell, do you think?" she asked Amber. "I doubt that Vesta's still here, but I've got a key." She rummaged in her bag, then stopped when she felt Amber's eyes on her.
"This feels so eerie," Amber murmured. "Like I'm stepping back in time. I always hated this house—it held so many terrible memories. But there were good ones, too." She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out again. "Until now, it hasn't seemed real that Mama's gone."
Diedre's eyes stung. "Everything's gone," she murmured.
"Not everything." Amber's dark gaze met and held Diedre's, and for just a moment, Diedre felt as if she were looking into Mama's eyes. "We've got each other."
Each other The words should have comforted Diedre, but she felt nothing. She was dead inside, wasted and empty as a vast desert. Even the memory of seeing Daddy and Uncle Jack standing before the judge pleading guilty, and the knowledge that they were now both in prison, hadn't brought the closure and resolution she had longed for.
She wasn't sorry justice had been served, but it gave her no satisfaction. The hatred she had felt when she'd first learned what Daddy had done to Amber had metamorphosed into aching sorrow, and just a little pity. But oddly, she missed the anger. It had brought her strength, and now that it had dissipated, she felt drained and hollow. The final verdict had come, but it had turned out to be an anticlimax.
Diedre nudged Amber's elbow and pointed toward the glider and chairs that stood on the far side of the wide front verandah. "Let's sit out here for a few minutes."
They settled into the chairs and sat gazing across the expanse of lawn to where the yard fell away into a magnificent view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The morning was warm and clear, and a faint breeze blew off the ridge and stirred the rhododendrons that surrounded the house. Diedre unhooked Sugarbear's leash, and the dog took off at a run, sniffing every bush and blade of grass and bounding like a puppy with the joy of being back on her home turf.
"Well, it's over," Diedre sighed. "How do you feel?"
Amber stared down at her bandaged hands and shook her head. "I'm not quite sure. I'm glad we didn't have to go through a long, drawn-out trial. But I have to admit that I was pretty shaken by Daddy's meltdown. And I wish—" She stopped suddenly and shook her head.
"Wish Daddy had taken responsibility for his actions?" Diedre supplied. "Wish he had at least said, I'm sorry'?"
Amber nodded. "Because the molestation charge was thrown out, I'm afraid I'm left feeling, well, not quite vindicated."
"Me, too," Diedre admitted. "But what do we do about that?"
"There's nothing we can do, except go on with our lives."
"I'm not sure I have much of a life to go on with."
Amber cocked her head and gazed at Diedre curiously. "What do you mean? You're twenty-five years old, honey—you have your whole life ahead of you."
"But you're going back to Washington. And I certainly can't live here—" she waved a hand at the gray stone facade.
"If you need me to stay, I will."
The words fell on Diedre's soul like water on dry ground, but she shook her head. "I can't ask that of you. You belong with Twojoe. He loves you. You love him."
"Yes, I do. But I love you, too." Amber leaned forward and smiled earnestly. "You are my daughter. I want to be with you, to get to know you better, to be part of your life. If I need to stay in North Carolina in order for that to happen, that's what I'll do."
A rush of gratefulness welled up in Diedre's heart. "I have a better idea. Carlene and I already talked about it—she doesn't really need me to set up the shop, and as we both know, I have some emotional work to do, work that's going to require the help of a counselor."
Amber raised one eyebrow. "And?"
"And I was thinking—well, maybe I should come back to Washington with you for a while. Your priest friend Susan is a good therapist, isn't she? I could find a place to rent, do some freelance photography, maybe even sell some of my photos through Andrew Jorgensen's gallery. It would give us time together—and a chance for me to get my life in order. A change of scenery might be good for me."
For a minute or two Amber didn't say a word, and Diedre wondered if perhaps her brilliant idea wasn't so brilliant after all. Maybe Amber wouldn't want her hanging around all the time, getting in the way of her relationship with Twojoe. Maybe—
"Let's go in," Amber said, getting to her feet. "We've got things to do."
"Like what?"
"Well, for one thing, I need to call Meg and Twojoe. And then we'll need to make a run to the store."
"To the store? Why?"
She leaned down and kissed Diedre lightly on the cheek. "Boxes," she said. "If you're going to pack, we'll need lots and lots of boxes."
Duncan McAlister could barely remember his outburst in the D.A.'s office, or standing before the judge entering a guilty plea. It was all a blur, like a vague dream that vanishes in that split second between hearing the alarm clock and waking to consciousness. He knew it had happened; it just didn't seem real.
But his incarceration was real enough, and it was no dream. They had not, as both Jack Underwood and Boxer O'Malley had promised, been sentenced to a minimum security white-collar "country-club" prison. This was the real thing, with clanging iron bars and armed guards and tiny, high windows that barely let any sunlight into the cells. The noise level—shouting, cursing, banging at all hours of the day and night—was enough to drive a man mad. And the smells! Stale sweat, disinfectant, urine, mildew—the combined stench seeped from the cinder block walls like ooze from an open sore.
Even worse than what was, however, was the fear of what might be. Since the moment he had been led into this place and shoved roughly into his cell, anxiety had gripped Duncan like a bad case of dysentery. His cellmate, Rufus Kiley—a tattoo-covered Neanderthal who went by the nickname Blade—had sized him up with narrowed eyes and a guttural warning to keep out of his way. Duncan took the man seriously and had not spoken a word to him since.
Breakfast was over. Somewhere in the cellblock a bell rang, and the bars slid sideways with a clank. Duncan got to his feet and stood two steps behind Blade, whose bulk completely filled the open cell door.
A guard came down the corridor with a clipboard in his hands and paused outside the cell. "Kiley, McAlister—laundry," he muttered. "Get moving."
Duncan's heart sank. Laundry duty was the nastiest, smelliest, sweatiest job imaginable. Jack had been assigned there on his first day, and at dinner last night, had been complaining about how awful it was. If there was any hope of surviving in here, Duncan would have to get on the warden's good side—and fast. If he could just get himself out of this brain fog, show the man how adept he was at administrative duties—
Blade craned his neck and gave him a leering grin, revealing a crooked row of tobacco-stained teeth. He jerked his head and set off down the hall, with Duncan following behind like a cowed dog.
If Duncan thought the chaos in the cellblock was bad, it was nothing compared to what he encountered in the laundry room. The yelling, the noise of the machines, the steam, and the humid, stifling heat convinced him that his initial evaluation of this place was accurate: he had been sentenced not to prison, but to hell itself.
A tall, skinny black man—apparently the prison trusty who ran the laundry—pointed toward a bank of washing machines. "In the back on the right!" he shouted in Duncan's ear. "You'll work with Kiley!"
Duncan looked. Blade Kiley, who obviously had been here before and knew the ropes, stood between two bins of dirty laundry, grinning and motioning to him. The trusty nudged him from behind. "Go on."
Duncan made his way down the row between the machines, feeling as if he were negotiating a narrow city street. Along both sides, and higher than his head, the huge machines thumped and whined. It was like walking through a nightmarish mechanical maze. When he got to the back of the room, he took a right in the direction Blade had indicated, and—
"Augghhh!" The air rushed out of him as something solid as iron collided with his midsection. Stunned, Duncan doubled over, grasping the nearest laundry bin for support. He looked up to see Blade standing over him, pounding one fist into the other open palm. Around Kiley in a jagged semicircle stood eight or nine other inmates, all glaring at him. Blade grabbed the front of his jumpsuit and jerked him forward, and the circle closed in around the two of them.
Duncan tried to scream, but no sound would come, and even if he had been able to yell, no one would have heard him above the noise of the laundry. Frantically he looked around; there was not a single guard in sight.
Blade hit him again, a blow to the jaw that drove Duncan's lower teeth all the way through his tongue. Something warm and liquid filled his mouth. He gasped for air and spit out a mouthful of blood.
His heart was pounding a wild, erratic beat, and his head spun.
Kiley drew him up by the collar, so close Duncan could smell the man's foul breath. "Think you're such a big man?" he spat out. "A big important man? We know about you." He let fly a string of curses directly in Duncan's face, and the circle of inmates closed in tighter.
Someone snaked a leg out, catching Duncan around the ankles, and he felt his knees crack when they hit the concrete floor. Blade grabbed a fistful of hair and lifted Duncan's face upward. "We know what you did to your little girl, you piece of garbage. It's time you learned exactly what happens in a place like this to a slime ball like you."
Diedre pulled open the bottom desk drawer and began loading its contents into a cardboard box. Amber sat on the bed watching, and Vesta, who hadn't been able to stop smiling in the past two hours, hovered about like a protective angel.
They hadn't been able to see Vesta at all since they had returned to North Carolina—neither Diedre nor Amber had been willing to take the chance of running into Daddy. After the aborted trial and sentencing, Vesta could have simply left the house and gone back to the little cottage she had inherited when her parents died, but she hadn't. She had stayed alone in the big, old mansion, braving its memories, its ghosts. Waiting. Waiting for her girls to come home.
The reunion between Amber and Vesta was a joy to behold. Vesta kept stroking her, touching her, calling her "my baby," and fussing over her burned hands. In a private moment, Amber had confessed to Diedre that she hadn't expected Vesta to seem quite so . . . so old. It had been more than twenty years since Amber had seen Vesta, of course, but Diedre had to admit that Vesta had aged noticeably just in the past few weeks. She seemed frail and nervous. Her spotted, brown hands shook, and she had a worried, exhausted look around her eyes.
It was no wonder, given what she had been through. First Mama's illness and death, then Diedre's absence, Daddy's arrest and imprisonment, and now Amber's return and the revelation that she was Diedre's mother.
But once she had heard the entire story and gone through the cycle of tears, laughter, and more tears, Vesta seemed remarkably able to adapt. "I reckon it's about time for this old woman to retire anyway," she said. "I'll just take my old self home, prop my feets up, and watch Murder, She Wrote reruns until the Good Lord takes me on to glory."
"I'll pay you what Daddy owes you," Diedre promised, although she had no idea how she would come up with the money. She had nothing of her own, and all Daddy's assets were frozen. Now that she thought about it, she was, in fact, destitute. Nearly everything she owned would fit in a few small boxes.
"What about this house?" Amber asked as Diedre went on packing. "Is there a mortgage on it?"
Diedre shook her head. "It was paid off five or six years ago. But I have no idea what will happen to it now. I guess it'll just sit here empty until it falls in on itself."
Amber let out a cynical laugh. "An appropriate monument to Duncan McAlister's life, I'd say. But it is a shame to let it go to ruin."
"I wouldn't live in it. Would you?"
Amber shook her head. "Heavens, no. This house represents my worst memories and my most vivid nightmares. Still, it seems like a waste."
Continuing to sort through items from her desk drawer, Diedre pulled out two green slips of paper and grinned to herself. "Vesta," she said over her shoulder, "do you still have a driver's license?"
"Course I do, child. I ain't decrepit, and I got eyes like a hawk." She chuckled. "A real old hawk, maybe."
"You want a brand new Lexus with a CD player and power every-thing?"
Vesta gave Diedre a puzzled frown. "Most anything'd be better than that beat-up old Ford I got. Spends most of its time in my nephew's shop."
Diedre flipped the title over, signed it, and handed it to Vesta. "Mama willed it to me when she died. Now it's yours. I'll keep my Camry. It's only got twenty-two thousand miles on it; for a Toyota, that's barely broken in. Except for the tires. Driving in the mountains is murder on tires. Do you think your nephew could get me a deal on new ones?"
"Honey, you ain't gonna give me your mama's car!"
"Nope. I'm going to sell it to you, if you want it. One dollar, and that's my final offer." She winked in Amber's direction. "Metallic champagne with matching leather interior. You'll look great in it, Vesta. Call it an installment on what I owe you."
Vesta fished a wrinkled dollar bill out of her pocket, pressed it into Diedre's hand, and smothered her with a hug. "You don't owe me nothin', baby," she said in choked voice.
"I owe you more than that," Diedre responded. "Much more."
Amber shifted on the bed and tucked her legs under her. "Does this mean we're taking the Camry back to Washington?"
Diedre nodded. "I hate to make that long drive back again, but I'll need a car when I get there, and we have to haul all this—" She gestured to the boxes scattered around the bedroom and grinned in Amber's direction. "Besides, I felt a little pretentious in the Lexus, and I prefer Midnight Blue to Metallic Champagne."
The telephone on the bedside table rang, and Diedre jumped, her heart thudding in her chest. "Should I answer it?"
Amber cut a glance at Vesta, who nodded. "Why not? If it's for Daddy, it has to be somebody who's been hiding under a rock or abducted by aliens. Tell them he's temporarily indisposed . . . for the next twenty years or so."
Diedre picked up the receiver and answered formally: "McAlister residence."
She strained to listen as the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line spoke in subdued tones. Amber and Vesta went on talking about Washington, about Twojoe and Meg and the llamas and little Sam Houston, about how long it would take for Amber and Diedre to make the trip—
"H-hang on a second, will you?" Diedre put the receiver to her chest and fought for breath. She turned in Amber's direction. "I'm afraid we won't be going anywhere—at least not for a while."
"What?" Amber swung her legs over the side of the bed and stared at Diedre. "What are you talking about? Who's on the phone?"
"It's the warden at the prison. He called Elise Glass, who called Carlene's house. She told them we were here."
"Well, what does he want?"
"He wants us to go to the county morgue and claim the body. Daddy's dead."