By the next day, sheer willpower was the only thing keeping Annie on her feet and allowing her to function. Her time was running out. The slamming of the front door as Jason left for school made her flinch. His constant hostility toward Harper was wearing on her. She didn’t understand her son’s attitude, but he obviously felt threatened somehow by Harper’s presence. If only she knew how to reassure him. If only there was anything to reassure him about.
For something to do, she rose from the breakfast table and began stacking dirty plates.
“We need to talk, Annie.”
Harper’s grim tone made her heart pound. This was it, then. Her hour of reckoning.
“I need to tell you what I found when I went through your insurance papers.”
The dishes rattled in her hands. A reprieve. She turned toward the sink to hide her relief. “What did you find?”
“What do you think I found?”
Annie let out a sigh, set the dishes in the sink, then turned around to face Harper. Leaning back against the counter, she folded her arms across her chest and gave him a wry smile. “If you mean money or financial security for any of us, I’m sure you didn’t find much of anything.”
“You knew Mike let his life insurance policy lapse?”
Her heart sank. “I was afraid of that. Money’s been tight lately, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He just kept saying everything would be all right. He was expecting to come into some money soon.”
Harper gave a grunt. “Working at a garage and body shop? Not likely. Where was this money supposed to come from? What was he going to do, sell the house?”
“No,” she cried, startled. She took a slow breath and spoke more calmly. “No, he wasn’t going to sell the house.”
“Are you sure?” Harper bit back. “He sold the rest of the place piece by piece. He hated farming. You could have sold the house and moved into town and he wouldn’t have had to put up with any of it anymore. Frankly, I’m surprised he stayed at it this long.”
Annie shook her head. “He would never have sold the house. We had an agreement. Besides, it wasn’t the place he didn’t like, it was farming. He just didn’t care anything about raising crops or tending stock. That’s why he sold off the fields.”
“That still leaves the cattle. Mike hated cows.”
“Yes.” She smiled faintly. “But the cattle have been more or less mine for years, so he never worried about them.”
“Yours?” His eyebrows climbed up his forehead.
Hers did the same. “Why not?”
Harper opened his mouth, then shut it. “No reason. I just never figured you for…it’s a hell of a lot of work, Annie, taking care of cattle.”
“Tell me about it. But we never have more than eight or ten head at once, I enjoy it, and it brings in money.”
“Not enough for you and Jason to live on, surely.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not enough.”
“What are you going to do?”
She pushed away from the counter and turned back to the sink. “I have some savings. That’ll last us until I figure it all out.”
“Annie…”
“What?” She glanced at him over her shoulder.
“Your savings…the passbook was in with the paperwork I went through.”
“Not that account,” she told him, turning back to the sink. “I started my own account several years ago. Mike knew nothing about it. It’s not a lot of money, but between that and the cattle, we can manage for a couple of years, if we’re careful.”
“Wake up, Annie. Eight or ten head of cattle aren’t going to supplement much of anything.”
“They will when you’ve got one of the top registered Limousin bulls in the state. It’s not your worry, Harper, but I thank you for caring.”
“Then would you mind answering a question for me?”
Annie fought the urge to stiffen. With her back to him, she closed her eyes. “What do you want to know?”
“I want you to tell me about the bruises on your face and neck.”
She went still for a long moment before reaching out to turn on the water. “I told you, it was an accident.”
“Yeah. You told me. Are you saying a man accidentally wrapped his hand around your throat and squeezed so hard he left fingerprints?”
When she failed to answer, he swore. “Some funny kind of accident, Annie. People get killed that way.”
Annie drew in a slow breath. She couldn’t talk about her bruises. There was no point. It would only appall Harper, and make her relive it all again.
Tires crunched on the gravel drive outside. Annie welcomed the interruption.
Harper swore again.
It was Mrs. Crawford, the reverend’s wife, coming to bring more food and pick up her empty casserole dish left from the day of the funeral. A few minutes after she left, May Smith from down the road called, wanting to know what had happened after Annie had used her phone yesterday to call the sheriff. Then another visitor, another call.
By the time Jason came home from school, Harper was ready to explode with frustration. Starting with Mrs. Crawford’s visit, he had not had more than three minutes worth of privacy with Annie all day. He spent the entire day either making polite conversation with her friends and neighbors, or listening to Annie talk on the phone to more friends and neighbors.
He should have asked about Jason the minute the boy left for school. Hell, he should have asked last night.
Harper stood at the back door and watched the boy shoot a basketball through the crooked hoop mounted above the door of the detached garage. It was the only decent place for basketball because of the concrete pad in front of the garage.
Weak winter sunlight cast long shadows across the drive and yard. Harper watched with hungry eyes, wondering just how closely related he and Jason were.
The wind whipped Jason’s sandy hair and turned his cheeks and nose red, but boys never minded a little cold wind, even if his wrists were poking out of the coat he’d outgrown. Besides, from what Harper had been able to determine, young Jason would go to great lengths to avoid him. A little cold air was nothing.
The sight of the ball rebounding off the backboard and dropping through the hoop stirred memories, as did the slap, slap, slap of the ball and a pair of Nikes against concrete. Harper and Mike used to shoot baskets. Sometimes Dad would join them in the late evenings. Hell, Harper and his dad had shot a few on Harper’s last night home, just before he’d gone to pick Annie up for their date. Ringer had darted in and out between their legs…
Ringer. Harper hadn’t thought of the dog in years. More memories crowded in on him.
Annie came to an abrupt halt in the kitchen doorway, the armful of sheets for the wash growing suddenly heavy. The way Harper stood there, intently watching Jason’s every move out on the driveway, made a fist of pain clench around her heart.
Harper must have heard her, for he spoke softly. “It seems odd, watching a boy play in that driveway without a dog to trip over. Whatever happened to Ringer?”
Annie’s breath hitched. The reminder of Ringer made her want to weep. Harper had given her Ringer when the dog was eight weeks old. Because Annie and her mother lived in the apartment over the drugstore, Ringer had stayed on the Montgomery farm. But he had been her dog. The first pet she’d ever had.
The day Harper had given her the puppy, a week before he’d left that last time, had been the happiest day of Annie’s life. It was two weeks after she’d graduated from high school, and it was the day Harper had asked her to marry him. He’d been so animated and full of life back then, not like this somber man now before her. He’d been so eager to propose that he hadn’t waited until he could buy her a ring. He’d bought her a puppy instead, as an engagement present.
The soft smile that curved her lips at the memory faded as another memory surfaced. Mike had always hated Ringer because Harper had given him to her.
“What happened to him?” Harper asked again, glancing over his shoulder at her.
Annie hitched the sheets up and started across the kitchen toward the laundry room. “He died about four years ago.” She could never tell Harper that in a fit of jealous rage, Mike had shot the dog.
When she came out of the laundry room a few moments later, Harper was still watching Jason through the back door.
“Is he my son, Annie?”
The softly spoken question echoed through the room, through Annie’s heart, through her soul. Her feet became lead weights, anchoring her to the spot on the old linoleum where she stood. Her answer, when it came, was no more than a whisper.
“Yes.”
The word hit Harper like a bullet in the chest. His brain had expected it. His heart had not. Pain exploded inside him. Then anger. A rage like he’d never known before, so powerful it left him momentarily dizzy. Damn the deceiving bitch!
With his jaw clenched tight enough to crack his molars, he turned from the window and glared at the pale woman across the room. “Damn you, Annie. Damn you. How could you keep my own son from me for ten years? How, dammit? Why? How could you let another man raise my son as his?”
“Harper…I…” Annie reached a hand toward him. “I…” She let her arm drop.
“Come on, Annie,” he taunted. “You’ve had ten years to get your story straight. Come on, let me have it. I can hardly wait. This ought to be really good. Tell me why you passed my son off as Mike’s. What did you do, hop into bed with him the day after I left so he’d think the baby was his?”
“No!”
Finally, Harper thought with grim satisfaction. Finally some emotion in that oh-so-calm face. She hadn’t expected his accusation. Her shock was apparent.
“No?” he asked. “Then how did you do it? How did you trick him into marrying you?”
“I didn’t trick him,” she cried. “He tricked me!”
He’d expected denial, but not reversal. “The hell you say.”
Her face went blank again. Damn her, was this so trivial, so meaningless to her that she didn’t feel anything?
“You remember what I was like back then,” she told him, her voice barely showing any strain at all. “I was young and gullible. Naive. He lied to me, played on all my fears, and I’m ashamed to say I believed him. Trust me, I’ve paid for my stupidity every day since.”
Harper snorted in disgust. “Yeah, I’ll just bet.
She closed her eyes and tilted her face up. “Are you going to let me explain?”
“Oh, you’ll explain, all right, if I have to drag every word out of you.”
She shook her head. “No, I want to tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you for years, but I— You remember Mother and I didn’t have a phone. You had even told me that if I needed anything, to tell Mike, because you would call home whenever you got the chance. The minute I suspected I was pregnant, I asked Mike to tell you the next time you called.”
The rage in Harper’s gut condensed into an icy-hot ball in the pit of his stomach. “When? When did you tell him?”
“Around the middle of August. I wasn’t sure yet, but I thought—hoped—you’d want to know.”
The sickness inside him expanded. “He never told me.”
“I know,” she said tiredly. “At least, I know that now. At the time…He said…he said I was supposed to let him know when I was sure. That you weren’t going to worry about it until I knew.”
Harper’s first instinct was to object. His own brother wouldn’t play games like that. Not about something so important. Mike had never mentioned that Annie thought she might be pregnant. But deep inside, Harper knew Mike was perfectly capable of saying anything to get what he wanted. Still, Harper would have thought Annie would have had more faith in him. “You believed him?”
“I didn’t know what to believe. I was scared, and I was sick every morning, then my aunt died and Mother started making plans to move again. The only reason we’d stayed in Crow Creek three years was because of my aunt. Mother and I had never lived anywhere that long before. This was the first place I ever thought of as home. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t know what to do. In September, when I found out for sure that I was pregnant, I told Mike.”
“And?”
Annie rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “About a week later he came to me and said that when he told you, you laughed.”
“That I what?”
“He said you were so excited about the case you were on that you didn’t care about anything else. He said you had women hanging off of you day and night, and that you weren’t coming home anytime soon.”
Harper could do no more than stand there with his mouth hanging open for a long moment before he managed to speak, his voice harsh with incredulity. “And you believed him?”
“Not at first.” Her voice broke. She waited a long moment before speaking again. “But I was so scared. I had vowed all my life that I wasn’t going to raise a child like my mother raised me. Any child I had was going to have a real home, a permanent home, and a father. And a mother who loved him. When I didn’t hear from you, not a letter, not even a postcard…”
“I wrote several times. You never answered.”
She looked away. “I found out later—much later—that Mike…was keeping them. I never got a single one of your letters.” She shook her head. “So I thought you didn’t care. Mike played on that. You know how persuasive he could be. Your dad always said he could sell a man with a wooden leg a saw to cut it off with.”
Harper choked on a curse.
“I was…vulnerable. When you didn’t come home and it was almost Christmas, and Mike said you laughed about the baby, I was…devastated. He said he begged you to call home at a certain hour and he would make sure I was there, but that you said you couldn’t be bothered. Then he told me he loved me and wanted to marry me. That he would love the baby and raise it as his. I didn’t know what else to do but go along with him, since it was December, and you’d told me you were coming home in August. I…I thought you weren’t coming home at all.”
“Son of a bitch.” Harper crammed his hands into his pockets and lowered his head to stare at the floor. “I tried to call you at work at the drugstore. They told me you were out sick. I wrote to you, and I told Mike to tell you I wasn’t going to make it home when I’d planned.”
“I know,” she said softly.
Harper’s head snapped up. “You know? What the hell does that mean? If you knew I was coming home late—”
“I didn’t find out until later,” she interrupted.
“You said that before. How much later?”
Annie swallowed. “Six years.”
“Six…Son of a bitch.”
“That’s when I found out…everything Mike had done, all his lies, your letters that he kept…everything.”
“Wait a minute. You mean you found out—when, four years ago?—that Mike lied, that he tricked you into thinking I’d abandoned you?”
She swallowed again and nodded once. “That’s right.”
“You found out four years ago,” he said, his voice rising, “and you didn’t tell me? Even then you didn’t think I had a right to know about my own son?”
“What good would it have done?” Annie cried. “I was still married to Mike, and he and Jason were so close. I couldn’t rip Jason’s home apart on the off chance you would even believe me. The way you left here ten years ago, I had no reason to think you would.”
“Dammit, Annie—”
“I was wrong!” she cried, her fist clenched against her chest. “I know that now. I’ve known it for years. This entire mess, every bit of it, is nobody’s fault but mine.”
“Huh. What was Mike, some innocent bystander? I’ll tell you this, Annie, it’s a damn good thing he’s dead. If he was standing here right now, I’d—”
“No! Oh, God, Harper, don’t say it. Please, you don’t mean it. You don’t know what it’s like not to be able to take back angry words. The last words I said to him when he left for work the night he died were that I never wanted to see him again, that I never wanted him to come home. And he didn’t come home, and I feel like that’s my fault, too.”
Harper’s stomach roiled. He’d wanted to see some emotion in her face, but not ten years worth of guilt and anguish. “That’s crap, Annie. Mike’s death was an accident.”
“Was it? If we hadn’t argued, he never would have gone to the shop in the middle of the night. He was too drunk to—”
“What?”
Annie blinked. “What?”
“None of that was in the autopsy. That he was drunk, that he died in the middle of the night. It wasn’t in the police report, either. What the hell is going on around here?”
With a sniff, Annie waved away his concern. “That’s probably just Frank’s way of protecting the memory of his friend. He and Mike were just like they were in school—just like your dad used to say you and I were—as thick as thieves.”
Harper thought about it a minute and realized the answer could be that simple. Frank could have falsified the reports to keep Mike from looking like an ass. All the same, Harper decided to check it out. His cop’s instincts didn’t like inconsistencies.
Annie was watching him with a look of resignation so thorough, she might have been waiting for him to lower the guillotine. “So you and Mike had an argument the night he died. Is that how you got those bruises?”
She flushed and brought a hand to her cheek. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” He advanced on her, his anger flaring again. “I know he was no prize. Did he hit you? Did he try to choke you? Dammit, answer me? Tell me what happened!”
Behind him, the back door crashed open. Before Harper could turn, small fists pounded against his back.
“Don’t you hurt my mother! You get away from her! Don’t hit my mother!”
“Jason!” Annie pushed past Harper and reached for her son.
“Hey,” Harper cried. “I’m not going to hurt her, Jason.” He managed to turn and grab the boy’s wrists. The stark terror and the streaming tears on the young face cut Harper to the bone. Anger choked him again. What the hell had Mike done to Annie and her son? “It’s all right,” he assured the boy, fighting to keep the anger from his voice. “I wasn’t going to hurt her.”
“Yes you were,” Jason cried. “Just like Daddy did, and it was your fault.”
Something cold and deadly snaked through Harper’s blood. “It was my fault your dad hurt your mother?”
“You know it was! If it wasn’t for you, Mom wouldn’t have moved into her own room and left Daddy alone. If you weren’t my real father, Daddy wouldn’t have hit her.”
Harper’s chest tightened unbearably.
Beside him, Annie whimpered. “Jason, no,” she whispered in a tortured voice.
“I heard, Mom, I heard what Daddy said the night he died. And I heard before that, too. It’s his fault,” he said with a tearful glare at Harper. “If I wasn’t his little bastard, you would have loved Daddy and everything would have been fine and Daddy wouldn’t have started drinkin’ and wouldn’ta gone and got himself killed!”
A sob broke loose from Annie’s lips.
“It’s true, isn’t it,” Jason demanded. “Everybody’s always sayin’ how much I look like him instead of Dad. Even this stupid dimple. I hate it! I hate him. I don’t want to look like him!”
“Oh, honey…” Annie reached her arms toward Jason, but he whirled and fled the room. His running footsteps pounded up the stairs and down the hall, followed by the slamming of his bedroom door.
That final sound went through Annie like a gunshot. With an anguished cry, she started after him. “Jason!”
“Annie, no.” Harper caught her by the arm and swung her around. “Give him a minute, okay? Give yourself a minute. Hell, he’s the only one around here who hasn’t just had the wind knocked out of him.”
“He knew,” came her tortured whisper. “Oh, God, how long has he known? How long has he had to live with this?” Her knees wouldn’t hold her. As she sank to the floor, she slid from Harper’s grasp. She folded in on herself, wrapping her arms around her middle and rocking back and forth, the low moan of an animal in pain coming from deep inside her.
“Oh, God, I never dreamed he knew,” she cried. “I never dreamed he could be hurting so much and I wouldn’t know.”
Harper’s entire perception of the world had just been knocked askew. For ten long years he’d carried his pain and bitterness locked deep inside, where they couldn’t escape, where he wouldn’t notice them anymore. Finding out Jason was his son made it all erupt again, fresh and scalding in his throat. All this time he thought he’d been the one wronged. He’d been right, but only partly.
He’d wanted to see some emotion from Annie, but not this. God, not this.
And Jason. My son. Good God above, he had a son. A son who hates me.
But only because he didn’t understand. Yet how could anyone explain a mess like this to a nine-year-old who had known Mike as his father for his whole life?
It wasn’t Harper’s place to say anything just yet. But Annie was in no shape to help anyone. Come to think of it, neither was he. Regardless of all the nasty things he’d thought about her over the years, regardless of how hurt and angry he might still be, now that he knew the truth, he couldn’t stand to see her suffer this way. He dropped to his knees before her.
“Annie?”
She rocked and moaned, her head bent down, her face hidden by her hair falling forward.
“Annie.” Harper placed a hand on her shoulder. The sharp jolt he felt at the contact shocked him. It was unwanted, inappropriate as hell, and it was purely, searingly physical. A bolt of awareness so powerful he felt singed.
As he jerked his hand away, Annie’s head snapped up. She sucked in a sharp breath. He’d thought she’d been crying, but her eyes were dry. Mixed in with the pain of the past several minutes, maybe the past ten years, was a wariness and shock that told him he wasn’t the only one affected by that touch. She, too, felt the lightning.
She scrambled to her feet and backed away. “I need to go talk to Jason.”