Escape (15 page)

“New York. He couldn’t get away.”

Jude smirked. “Too bad—for him, not for me.”

I wasn’t sure whether it was the crooked smile, the shining eyes, or the sheer physicality of him—or the fact that he seemed to be slipping in and out of the old persona, making me wonder which was real. But I wasn’t comfortable here. It was time to leave.

“Dream on,” I said as I opened the car door and slid inside.

I didn’t say anything else, didn’t even glance at Jude as I backed around. As I drove down the rutted road, gaining speed on the descent, I held tight to the wheel. The faster I went, the more violently the car jounced, though my insides played a little part there. They were shaking on their own, a delayed reaction to seeing him, and it didn’t improve even when the car emerged and oblique rays of sun fractured the road.

Leave Bell Valley
, a little voice cried.
He is dangerous
,
and you have too much on your plate without that
. But where to go? Nothing had changed in New York. I didn’t want to go home to Mom and couldn’t deal with Dad yet. I had been hoping for a few weeks here before Jude arrived. I needed safe time. Now that was lost.

Still, leaving felt like failure.

Go get ’em
,
Emily
,
beard the lion in his den!
Dad used to say that each time my high school volleyball team, with its perpetually losing record, played top teams on their home courts.

Beard the lion?
Jude would be amused.

If asked, I would have sworn that he had been out of mind during the last ten years of my life. But seeing him now, I felt something. Desire? Not exactly. But something, and until I knew what it was, I couldn’t leave town.

Feeling vaguely manipulated by Jude, I grew annoyed, which was probably why I reacted so strongly when I saw the charcoal SUV parked on the far side of the green, now with a clear line of sight to the driveway of the Red Fox. I might have thought it was Jude in that car, taunting me, if I hadn’t just seen him back at the cabin, on foot.

With the sun slanting in a way that pierced the tinted windows, I saw the man inside look up, then back down. Texting my whereabouts? But to whom? And why only here—unless there had been a second spy at the Refuge—in which case this might be Amelia’s doing, though I couldn’t fathom her motive. But who else? I couldn’t imagine James doing this, and Dad’s man would be way more subtle.

I might not be able to control Jude Bell. But this was still my escape, and I didn’t need a tail. Leaving my car in the lot, I worked myself into a snit as I strode toward the inn.

Chapter 10
 

With tea under way in the parlor and me in no mood to be polite to guests, I entered the kitchen. The baker, Lee, was taking cookies from the oven. Vicki had just returned from the front with a plate to refill. At my stormy entrance, both looked back.

“Someone is following me,” I announced in a belligerent voice. “I have seen the same car sitting out front since the day I arrived. I don’t know who sent him, but someone is watching everything I do.”

Vicki didn’t seem surprised. “The gray SUV?”

“
Yeah
, but I don’t recognize the guy inside. Who is
watching
me?”

“Not watching you,” said Lee, drawing my eye. She was wearing oven mitts and a crestfallen face. “Watching
me.
”

Startled, I looked back at Vicki, only then realizing what I had missed in my own self-absorption. From the start, there was something she had wanted me to know about Lee.

“I think I need to be with my guests,” she said now, and slipped through the door.

Lee took a second cookie sheet from the oven and put in two new ones before looking at me again. I’m not sure if she thought I’d be at the table reading the newspaper, disinterested now that I knew
I
wasn’t the one in the crosshairs. But I was standing right there, waiting.

Did you hear about the lawyer hurt in a crash? An ambulance stopped suddenly
.

I was no ambulance chaser, but for the first time I understood what drove some lawyers to it.
Money
, you’re thinking, and for some that might be true. For others, it was a morbid fascination with wrongdoing, coupled with too much legal know-how, and for still others, just the adrenaline rush.

For me, right now, it was pure escapism. I leaned a hip against the counter, settling in.

“He’s watching me,” she repeated in a small voice. A swath of brown hair covered one eye, but the other held mine.

“Why?”

“Protection.”

“He’s
protecting
you. From what?”

“My husband’s family.”

Married? I wouldn’t have guessed that. She had struck me as being solitary to the extreme, and she wasn’t wearing a ring. “Why is his family after you?”

“They say I stole money from them. I did not,” she vowed with such a hard look that I believed her.

“What does your husband say?”

The hard look wavered. Her face came close to crumbling before she grabbed a spatula. “Nothing. He’s dead.”

“Dead. Oh, Lee, I’m sorry. When?”

“Three years ago.”

“Foul play?” I asked, because Lee didn’t look to be more than forty, and given accusations that necessitated a bodyguard, it sounded like his family was trouble. I imagined organized crime.

“He had a massive heart attack.”

Not something he had bought into. “I’m
so
sorry. How old was he?”

“Sixteen years older than me, but he loved me. They keep trying to say he didn’t and that I was just using him for the money, but I didn’t want money. All those things he gave me? I didn’t ask for any of it. He was the first person who ever loved me for me.”

She went at the cookies on the first of two sheets, lifting each with a spatula and slipping it onto a plate. They were oatmeal raisin cookies, and the smell was incredible, though I felt guilty even thinking that, given the subject at hand.

“Why do they say you stole money?”

She made a dismissive sound, seeming not to want to say more. I didn’t know whether it was the lawyer in me begging release, the woman in me feeling compassion, or the wife in me not wanting to think about Jude, but I said softly, “I may be able to help.”

“That’s what Vicki said, but I don’t know if anyone can.”

“Try me.”

Having emptied the first cookie sheet, she handed me the plate. “Would you bring these out front?”

I half worried that in the minute it took, she would run off. But she was at work on the second cookie sheet when I returned. Clearly upset, she wasn’t as efficient with these. Several broken cookies lay discarded by the rim of the sheet. This batch held chocolate macadamia nut ones, and those broken pieces were a serious temptation. It was all I could do not to grab one, they smelled so good. Or was it simply that my sense of smell, having been gone for so long, was more vivid?

The spatula skittered again. A dark sound came from Lee’s throat, then a bewildered, “I don’t know where to begin.”

I did. Talking with my husband might be a challenge, but talking with plaintiffs? I was good at this. With a fleeting thought of Layla, the young woman I had been trying to help last Friday morning in New York, I asked Lee, “How long were you and your husband married?”

“Six years.”

“Any kids?”

“No. And there weren’t any others. He had never been married before.”

“How did you meet?”

She broke the rhythm of her work to meet my gaze, daring me
before she said a word. “I worked in a bar. He sat at one of my booths. He was lonely and wanted to talk. He kept coming back for that.” Looking down again, she scooped off the last cookie and murmured, “Poor waitress dupes rich customer.”

“Was he rich?” I asked.

She seemed to consider how much to tell me. Finally, quietly, she said, “His family is. They make junk food. You’d know the name if I said it.”

“I take it they weren’t happy with the wedding.”

She rolled her eyes in response, and handed me the second plate of cookies. She was about to push the baking sheets into the soapy sink, when I said a helpless
“Whoa
,
”
and caught the edge of one. “You cannot throw these down the drain, Lee. I’m sorry”—I gathered up the cookie scraps—“I truly am focusing on your story, but it would break my heart to let these go to waste.” Once I had them in hand, I set them on the counter safely distant from the suds. I took the plate of perfect cookies into the dining room and hurried back, using the time to order my thoughts.

Taking up position beside the sink with a dish towel in my left hand and a shard of warm cookie in my right, I went on. “You say that he loved you. Did his family not believe that?”

She was scrubbing the first pan, putting anger into it. “They believed
his
feelings all right, just not mine. You can imagine the names they called me.”

I could. They would be classic. “And then he died.”

“Yes.” She lost her steam, suggesting what came next.

“No prenup.”

“No prenup. Just his will, leaving everything to me. That set them off.”

“How much is everything?” I asked, because wealth was relative, and Lee appeared to have none. Jeans, flannel shirt, sneakers—all were old and worn. Her hair was a mud brown that looked home-done; same with its chin-length cut. She wore neither makeup nor jewelry, and if she had a car, it was hidden from sight.

When she didn’t reply, I realized how intrusive my question was. The lawyer in me had kicked in. It must have threatened her. “You don’t have to answer that.”

“Vicki trusts you,” she said. She didn’t look like she fully agreed, but I sensed she was desperate. Still, it wasn’t until she handed me the first pan and started scrubbing the second that she said, “There was his share of the family money. I still don’t know how much that comes to. Ourselves, we had two houses, one in Manchester-by-the-Sea—in Massachusetts—and one in Florida. I sold the Florida one after he died. It was too big, and I never felt comfortable with his friends there. The Manchester house was big, too, but Jack had loved it, so it had emotional value, and I had to live somewhere. But it’s old and on the water. It cost a load to keep up, and the mortgage was huge. Jack had always said there was enough money in the family trust fund to support both homes, and then I just had the one, which should have made it easier, but the checks I got from the trust kept shrinking until I couldn’t pay the bills. When I asked the family lawyer about it, I got excuses like poor investments and a down market, and I believed it at first. Jack’s friends were all talking about investment scams, and I knew the market was bad.”

She passed me the second pan and, taking one of the mitts, removed the two last sheets from the oven. Chocolate chip here. The smell was too good to be true.

Nibbling on what I already had, I waited patiently.

“Then it got harder to contact the lawyer,” she finally said. “He was never in, and he wouldn’t return my calls. After a while, I’d have to be really stupid to buy it. So I called the trustee.” Her eyes met mine, pleading. “I was so careful not to accuse anyone of anything. I kept saying that I didn’t understand, and that I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought of selling the house, only nothing was selling, and something inside me felt like the money was there. Jack’s brothers weren’t selling their houses. I mean, it was pretty obvious. They were just trying to cut me out.”

“Did you say that to the trustee?”

“Oh yeah,” she said with regret. “Right after that, I got a call from the lawyer. He said that it looked to him like I was skimming money from the trust fund, and that I’d better hire a lawyer of my own, because I was in deep trouble.”

“Did you deny it?”

“Omigod,
yes
. It’s pretty funny he would even think I could pull that off. I don’t know how trust funds work, and I wouldn’t have a clue about how to skim money from one.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“Yes.” Her voice dropped, but not her eyes, which held mine, daring again. “He asked me whether a judge would believe the word of a convicted felon over that of a well-known, reputable family.” She looked like she was swallowing something big and bad.

“You have a record,” I said.

She nodded.

“Dated when?”

“Twenty years ago,” she said in a trembling voice and, taking the spatula, went to work plating the newly baked cookies. “I was working as a cook for a family like Jack’s. The wife was always losing her jewelry. She just left it around, and then, when no one could find it, she filed a claim with her insurance company. It was kind of a running joke in her family. This time it was a diamond bracelet. She dropped it near the toaster, a little snaky thing that tempted me just like those cookies tempted you. I left it there for the longest time. Usually she’d come looking. This time she didn’t.”

“Did you tell her about it?”

“No,” Lee said, scooping up another cookie, sliding it onto the plate.

“Why not?”

“I wanted to see how long she’d leave it there. Finally, I just took it. I didn’t have the guts to sell it, so they found it there in my room. Then they claimed I had taken other things that had gone missing.
Since they only had me on the bracelet, I got fourteen months. The rap sheet lasts forever.”