Judith McNaught (67 page)

that she had come on a long-overdue "peace mission" and she lifted the heavy brass door knocker.

An ancient butler with stooped shoulders answered the door wearing a dark suit and bow tie. "I'm Julie Mathison," she told him. "I'd like to see Mrs.

Stanhope if she's at home."

His shaggy white brows shot up over widened brown eyes when Julie gave her name, but he recovered

his composure and stepped back into a cavernous, gloomy foyer with a green slate floor. "I will see if Mrs. Stanhope will see you. You may wait there," he added, gesturing to a straight-backed,

uncomfortable-looking antique chair positioned beside a drum table at the left end of the foyer.

Julie sat down, her purse on her knees, feeling a little like a supplicant in the stifling, unwelcoming formality of the foyer, and she had a hunch that unexpected guests were intended to feel this way.

Concentrating on what she needed to say, she gazed at a German landscape hanging in an ornate dark frame on the opposite wall, then she turned nervously when the butler shuffled into the foyer.

"Madam will spare you exactly five minutes," he announced.

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Refusing to be daunted by that unpromising beginning, Julie followed him down a wide hall and then

passed in front of him as he opened a door and gestured her into a large room with a fire burning in a

massive stone fireplace and an Oriental carpet spread across a polished dark wood floor. A pair of high-backed chairs upholstered in a faded tapestry were positioned facing the fireplace, and since no one

was sitting on the sofa or any of the other furniture in the room, Julie erroneously assumed she was alone.

She wandered over to a table covered with silver-framed photographs, intending to study the faces of what she presumed were Zack's relatives and ancestors, then she saw that the wall on the left was covered with large portraits. With a fascinated smile, she started toward them, realizing that Zack hadn't exaggerated—there was a startling resemblance between himself and many of the Stanhope men.

Behind

her a sharp voice snapped, "You've just wasted one of your five minutes, Miss Mathison."

Whirling around in surprise, Julie looked for the source of the ominous voice and walked around to the

front of the chairs. There she had her second jolt because the woman who was rising to her feet, leaning

on a silver-handled ebony cane, was not the diminutive old woman who Julie had rather expected to

resemble the butler in stature and demeanor. Instead, she was taller than Julie by several inches, and once she gained her feet, her posture was as rigidly erect as the expression on her unlined face was stony and forbidding. "Miss Mathison!" the woman snapped,

"Either sit down or remain standing, but start talking.

Why have you come here?"

"I'm very sorry," Julie said hastily, backing quickly into the high-backed chair opposite Zack's grandmother's. She sat down so the woman wouldn't feel obliged to remain on her feet. "Mrs. Stanhope, I'm a friend of—"

"I know who you are, I've seen you on television,"

the woman interrupted coldly as she sat down. "He took you hostage and then converted you to his media spokesperson."

"Not exactly," Julie said, noting that the woman refrained from even using Zack's name. As always, when

Julie was prepared in advance to face a difficult confrontation, she was able to maintain an outward serenity that she didn't always feel, but this situation was even more tense and awkward than she'd expected.

"I asked you why you've come here!"

Instead of letting the older woman rile or intimidate her with her tone, Julie smiled and said quietly, "I'm here, Mrs. Stanhope, because when I was with your grandson in Colorado—"

"I have only one grandson," the other woman bit out,

"and he lives here in Ridgemont."

"Mrs. Stanhope," Julie said calmly, "you've only allotted me five minutes. Please don't make me waste

them caviling over technicalities because I'm afraid I'll end up leaving here without having explained what

I came here to tell you—and I think you're going to want to hear it." The woman's white brows snapped together at Julie's tone, and her mouth thinned, but Julie forged bravely ahead. "I'm aware that you do not

acknowledge Zack as your grandson, just as I'm aware that you also had another grandson who died tragically. I'm also aware that the breach between you and Zack has remained during all these years because of his stubbornness."

Her face twisted with derision. "He told you that?"

Julie nodded, trying to ignore the older woman's unexpected sarcasm. "He told me a lot of things in Colorado, Mrs. Stanhope, things he's never told anyone before." She waited, hoping for some sign of curiosity, but when Mrs. Stanhope continued to regard her stonily, Julie had no choice except to continue

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without encouragement. "Among other things, he told me that if he had his life to live over again, he would

have reconciled with you long ago. He admired you very much and he loved you—"

"Get out!"

Julie stood up automatically, but her temper was rapidly igniting and she fought it down with all her strength. "Zack admitted you and he were very much alike, and when it comes to stubbornness, he was clearly telling the truth. I am trying to tell you that your grandson regrets the breach between the two of you and that he loves you."

"I said get out! You should never have come here!"

"Apparently not," Julie agreed tautly, reaching for the purse she'd left beside the chair. "I had no idea a grown woman, facing the end of her life, could still harbor some absurd grudge against her own flesh and

blood for something he did when he was still a boy.

How bad could it possibly have been that you can't forgive him?"

Mrs. Stanhope's laugh was bitter. "You poor fool! He duped you, too, didn't he?"

"What?"

"Did he actually ask you to come here?" she demanded. "He didn't, did he? He would never have dared!"

Sensing that a negative reply would somehow play right into the woman's hands and harden her even further against Zack, Julie threw all her pride away and gambled everything on this last chance to reach the woman's heart. "He did not ask me to come here and tell you how he felt about you, Mrs. Stanhope.

He did something that is even more revealing about the respect and love he still has for you." Drawing a fortifying breath, Julie ignored the woman's freezing expression and said, "I hadn't heard from him until I received his letter a week and a half ago. He wrote to me because he was afraid I was pregnant, and in his letter, he implored me not to have an abortion if I was. He asked me instead to bring his baby to you to raise, because he said you had never shirked a responsibility in your life, and you wouldn't shirk that

one. He said he would write you a letter first to explain—"

"If you are pregnant by him and you have any comprehension of genetics," his grandmother interrupted

furiously, "you'll have an abortion! Regardless of what you do, I wouldn't have his misbegotten brat in my

house."

Julie stepped back from the evil of those remarks.

"What kind of monster are you anyway?"

"He is the monster, Miss Mathison, and you are his dupe. Two people who loved him have already died violent deaths at his hand. You're lucky you weren't the third!"

"He did not kill his wife, and I don't know what you're talking about when you say two people—"

"I'm talking about his brother! As surely as Cain killed Abel, that demented monster killed Justin. He shot him in the head after a quarrel!"

Confronted with such vicious lies, Julie lost her control. Shaking with fury and shock, she said,

"You're

lying! I know exactly how Justin died and why! If you're saying these things about Zack because you're trying to justify turning away his baby, you're wasting your breath! I'm not pregnant, and if I was, I
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wouldn't leave you alone in the same house with my baby! No wonder your own husband couldn't keep loving you and took up with other women. Oh, yes, I know all about that!" she burst out when shock momentarily cracked Mrs. Stanhope's contemptuous glower. "Zack told me everything. He told me that his grandfather said you were the only woman in the world he'd ever loved, even though everyone thought he'd married you for your money. Your husband told Zack he just couldn't meet your high standards, and he finally quit trying to do it soon after you were married. What I can't understand,"

Julie

finished with contempt, "is why your husband loved you or why Zack admired you! You don't have standards—what you have is ice instead of a heart!

No wonder poor Justin couldn't tell you he was gay!

Zack isn't the monster, you are!"

"And you," Mrs. Stanhope countered, "are the monster's pawn!" As if Julie's loss of control was contagious, the rigidity drained from the older woman's face and her autocratic voice was suddenly edged with weariness. "Sit down, Miss Mathison!"

"No, I'm leaving."

"If you do," she challenged, "then you're afraid of the truth. I agreed to see you because I watched you plead for him on television, and I wanted to hear what could possibly have brought you here. I thought

you must be some sort of opportunist, desperate to remain in the limelight and that you'd come here to dredge up something that might do that for you.

Now, it is obvious to me that you are a young woman of

considerable courage and strong convictions and that it is your misguided sense of justice that sent you here. I respect courage, Miss Mathison, especially in my own sex. I respect yours enough to discuss things with you that are still intensely painful to me.

For your own sake, I suggest you listen to me."

Stunned by the drastic change in the tone of conversation, Julie hesitated beside her chair but remained

stubbornly standing.

"I gather from your expression that you've decided not to take my word for anything," Mrs. Stanhope said, watching her. "Very well. Were I as deluded and loyal as you clearly are, I wouldn't listen to me either." She picked up the bell on the table beside her chair and rang it, and a moment later the butler appeared in the doorway. "Come in here, Foster,"

she ordered, and when he complied, she turned to Julie and said, "How do you think Justin died?"

"I
know
how he died," Julie corrected fiercely.

"What do you think you know?" Mrs. Stanhope retorted, brows raised.

Julie opened her mouth to tell her, and then hesitated, belatedly remembering that this was an old woman

and that Julie actually had no right to destroy her memories of Justin merely so that she'd cease to hate Zack. On the other hand, Justin was already dead, but Zack was still alive. "Look, Mrs. Stanhope, I don't want to hurt you any more than I probably have, and the truth is going to do that."

"The truth can't hurt me," she scoffed.

That mocking tone of Mrs. Stanhope's scraped against Julie's raw nerves and broke her slender thread

of control. "Justin killed himself," she said flatly.

"He shot himself in the head because he was a homosexual and he couldn't face that. He admitted it to Zack an hour before he killed himself."

The other woman's cold gray eyes never flinched; she simply stared at Julie with a mixture of pity and disdain, then she reached for a framed photograph on the table beside her and held it out. "Look at this,"

she said. Left with no choice, Julie took the photograph and looked at the fair-haired, smiling youth who

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was standing at the helm of a sailboat. "That is Justin," Mrs. Stanhope said in a carefully expressionless

voice. "Does he look like a homosexual to you?"

"That's a ridiculous question to ask. What a male looks like is no indication of his sexual orientation

—"

Julie broke off as Mrs. Stanhope turned on her heel and walked over to a large antique cabinet on the far wall of the room. With one hand on her cane, she bent and opened the door, revealing shelves containing crystal glasses, then she pulled hard on the top shelf and the whole panel swung out in an arc.

Behind it, Julie saw the door of a concealed safe, and she watched in a state of inexplicable uneasiness as Mrs. Stanhope turned the dial, opened the safe, and extracted a large brown expandable file tied with an elastic cord. Her face wiped clean of expression, Mrs. Stanhope untied the elastic cord and dropped the

file onto the sofa in front of Julie. "Since you won't take my word about what happened, there is the record of the coroner's inquiry into Justin's death and the newspaper reports."

Unwillingly, Julie's eyes dropped toward the papers that had spilled partially out of the folder, and her gaze riveted on the front-newspaper clipping with a picture of an eighteen-year-old Zack, another of Justin, and a headline that read:

ZACHARY STANHOPE ADMITS SHOOTING

BROTHER, JUSTIN

Her hand beginning to tremble uncontrollably, Julie reached down and picked up those clippings that had slid from the folder. According to the newspaper story, Zack had supposedly been in Justin's bedroom, talking to his brother, while examining a gun from Justin's collection, a Remington automatic handgun that

Zack thought was unloaded. During the

conversation, the gun had fired accidentally, striking Justin in the

head and killing him instantly. Julie registered the words she read, but her heart rejected them. Tearing her gaze from the clippings, she glared at Mrs.

Stanhope and said, "I don't believe any of this!

Newspapers print things that aren't true all the time."

Mrs. Stanhope stared at her, her face coldly impassive as she reached down and extracted a bound

transcript from the folder on the sofa and thrust it at Julie. "Then read the truth in his own words."

Julie tore her gaze from the woman's expressionless face and looked at the manuscript cover, but she didn't touch it. She was afraid to. "What is that?"