Keepsake (44 page)

And then came heaven: The two big windows that used
to look out at the grounds were
now a pair of French doors. With one savage kick, Quinn sent them flying open and escaped with Olivia into the safe embrace of damp night air, far from the house. He laid her on the grass and undid her
gag.

Breathing? He lifted her chin and tilted her head back, then turned his head with his ear over her mouth and listened for the sound of her breath and tried to feel the warmth of it on his cheek as he watched her chest for movement.
Please, please, breathe, Livvy.
Convinced that she had broken ribs, knowing that she was pregnant, he dreaded the thought of CPR.

Yes—breathing! She regained consciousness with a fit of coughing, and the sound was music to his ears. Reassuring her with motherly, mindless words, he cut through the cord around her ankles with his pocket knife and cursed the handcuffs; he hoped her captor suffered extra agony for those.

"Sweetheart
... Liv... I've got to get you to a hospital," he said, lifting her in his arms. "Maybe I can get the key to the cuffs—"

She said hoarsely, "No
... never mind
... only the baby
..."

Her head fell forward and her shoulders hunched in sudden pain, and he knew, despite never having seen it before, that she was in labor.

God in heaven—what more?

He carried her around to the front of the cottage, astonished to see that it was still in flames; that three police cars, lights flashing and radios chattering, crowded the area; and that a hook and ladder was heading up the drive through the chaos to fight the fire. He hadn't been aware of anything except the injured bundle of life that he held in his arms.

The first one to speak through the din was the police chief, and he had a gun drawn. Quinn looked around: they all had guns drawn. What were they, crazy?

"
Hand over the girl, Quinn. Nice and easy, now.
"

"Don't be a fool, Vickers! We have to get her to the hospital. She's hurt!"

"Fine, we'll do that," he said, cautiously holstering his gun. "Just... hand her over. I'll take care of it."

"No, goddammit, let me through!" Quinn said, moving toward his car. "I'm not the one who did this—Coach is!"

"That's not what he said," Vickers answered. "We'll have to straighten this all out. But Olivia comes first. Hand her over to us, Quinn. You're wasting time!"

Even as Vickers negotiated, Quinn was aware of the sound of a siren fading down
Main
. The coach was being hauled off in an ambulance! The coach, getting care before Liv!

"Yes... all right," he said in a confusion of agony.

"No, Quinn," Olivia moaned, pressing her cheek close to his chest. "Stay with me!"

"Oh, sweetheart—" Quinn turned to the chief. "Which car, goddammit?" he said savagely.

"Give her to me, Quinn."

"No, Quinn, don't do it
... stay with me!" She buckled inward with another contraction, unable because of the handcuffs even to satisfy the instinct to clutch her belly.

The scene bordered on the surreal. By the light of leaping, dancing flames, he scanned the faces of half a dozen hostile police officers and their chief, a lifelong friend of the psychotic villain who had been bent on destroying all that Quinn held dear.

"We're going to the hospital
now
.
"
he
shouted
.
Turning, he began
carrying Olivia toward one of the squad cars, ignoring Vickers, ignoring the guns. "Someone get in that car and drive; this woman is in labor," he
shouted
over his shoulder, throwing Olivia's ill-kept secret into the flames with everything else.

The standoff dissolved altogether when Olivia's mother suddenly burst from the shadows behind the police officers. "Oh, my baby, oh my God, Livvy!" she shrieked, throwing the scene into even more chaos.

After that, it became a blur. Everything happened in slow motion, or maybe it didn't happen at all; Quinn was never able to recall. Bits and pieces, those he remembered: someone freeing Olivia from the handcuffs; Olivia's urgent, anguished ramblings
as she clung to Quinn,
and Quinn's own fury at the unnerving noise of the sirens;
her mother
, a ghostly image in the rear window of the squad car riding ahead; a pair of latex gloves, but on whose hands? All of it was a jumble.

In the hospital they took Olivia away from him and treated him for his cuts. He gave a terse statement to Vickers, bitterly aware that it was only because of Olivia's intercession that he hadn't been hauled off to jail. After that he went to the visitors' room, and there he sat like one of the stones in one of his walls, in a state of total inertia.

Across the room, Olivia's mother waited with her head tipped back
and
leaning
on the wall behind her, a trail of tears rolling out intermittently from under her closed eyelids.

So far she and Quinn had exchanged no conversation. What could he say to her? "By the way, the baby that Olivia is in danger of losing—that's
 
mine"? The chances were good that Teresa Bennett had figured that out. She had probably also figured out that Quinn was responsible for Olivia's self-imposed estrangement from the rest of her family. And finally, although it paled by comparison, she was probably chalking up the loss of her beloved guest cottage to him as well.

All in all, it was hardly surprising that she was so quiet.

Rand
's arrival changed all that. His mother jumped up from her chair and flew to embrace him, and Quinn became aware, as he never had been before, of how instinctively families circled their wagons in times of crisis. With Quinn it had only been his father and him. It was hard to make a circle with just two wagons.

He got up to leave, to make it easier for them to rail at him in his absence. He didn't care. He was too sick at heart to think of anything else but the woman who was fighting for their child's life in there.

He was on his way out of the room when
Rand
grabbed him roughly by the arm. "Where do you get off playing God? Coming back the first time to demand justice, then coming back again—for what? She doesn't want any part of you. The whole
town
heard her say that today!"

Quinn shook his head. "Cool it,
Rand
," he said, fighting an impulse to knock him down. "We're all wound up a little tight right now."

"
Rand
, you don't know everything—" his mother began.

"I know one thing: Livvy wouldn't be in there now if it
weren't
for him." He swung back to face Quinn and said, "Do you deny that?"

Quinn got the word out through clenched teeth: "No."

"
Rand
, stop
... I didn't tell you everything on the phone. I didn't—she's pregnant by him!"

"What?"
Again he turned back to Quinn. His face was flushed with a complex of emotions; Quinn couldn't begin to guess which ones.

"Nice going, ace,"
Rand
said in a voice tight with contempt. "Anything else that you'd like us to know?"

"I'm not the one with the secrets."

The cut drew blood, but not enough to bring
Rand
down.

"Why can't we get it through your thick head that you and you alone are responsible for everything that's happened so far? We were all fine before you showed up. There was no problem before you showed up!"

Quinn exploded. "Get real,
Rand
!" he said, fed up with his refusal to accept responsibility for himself. "
Myra
had your ring, your letter. She was moving to the other end of the country. She
was ready to give
them to someone else if I hadn't been around. Would you rather it were Vickers?"

"What ring? What letter?" Teresa wanted to know. Her voice was high and shrill, the voice of a mother who's out of the loop.

"Shut up, Quinn. Shut the hell up!"
Rand
growled.

But Quinn had been pushed over the edge one time too many. He was tired of hanging by his fingernails and having to claw his way back to their level.

"Listen to me, you fool," he said. "Some of what happened
was
because I came back, but not all of it. The coach has been planning bloody vengeance for years; Olivia told me that on the way
here
. It was your father's decision to move the plant to
Mexico
that pushed him over the edge
.  He had planned to burn the mill down; now it seemed pointless.  So he decided to go after your mother tonight instead
—
your mother who once spured him.
Would that have been any better?"

"Bullshit! Why should we believe you?"

"Ask your sister.
God
, you don't deserve her! Tonight she was dragged, beaten, doused with gas, in premature labor, and still all she could think about was that Coach didn't kill Alison. She desperately wanted him to be the one who did. How does that make you feel, pal? Your sister's
fighting for her
—and all she can worry about is you and whether you were the one who killed Alison to cover up your affair gone wrong."

"
Rand
—then it was true!" Teresa cried. "You
were
the father! Oh
,
how I hoped that you weren't. All these years, I hoped, I prayed, I wanted it to be—God forgive me, I wanted it to be Rupert. Oh, Rand,
Rand
... then it was
true,"
she wailed.

Rand
, battered from both sides, said in a daze, "I'm sorry, Mom. I am. No one regrets it more. But I didn't kill Alison, you have to believe me." He whirled around on Quinn and said, "Don't you dare try to tell me I did!"

Hotly, Quinn said, "If you didn't, who did? Your father? Your father, who's gone behind you your whole life long with a shovel and pan, cleaning up your messes?"

"The answer to that is, yes," came a voice from behind Quinn.

Quinn whirled around to see
Owen Bennett, looking every one of his sixty-five years and carrying an overnighter in one hand. "So you can stop the shouting match right now. I was able to hear you all the way back at the nurses' station." He put down his bag and came over to his wife to embrace her. "How is she?" he asked Teresa softly.

"Livvy will be all right. They don't know yet about the
... about the baby."

He held his wife close and rocked her in his arms. "Shh
... everything's going to be fine, honey. Everything is going to be fine."

Quinn stared at them in disbelief. "You're all living a fantasy, you know that? Everything's
not
going to be fine. It hasn't
been
fine! Understand this: When Vickers comes back to grill me again as he's promised to do, I'm not holding anything back. Not a thing!"

"You don't
know
anything," Owen Bennett said calmly over his wife's head.

"Maybe not enough to satisfy Vickers; nothing I tell him ever does. But I'm damned if I'm going to continue to be part of this conspiracy of secrets and lies. Christ! How can you live with yourselves?"

Teresa Bennett broke away from her husband's embrace and made an imploring dash for Quinn. "You can't do that, Quinn. You can't! Think of Olivia! Think of that child!"

"That's exactly what I'm doing," he said coldly, disengaging himself from her grip. "Excuse me, will you?"

He turned and began walking away, desperate to be breathing clean, rain-washed air. But he wasn't out of the room before he heard Teresa Bennett's voice, clear and surprisingly calm, say, "My husband didn't do it, Quinn. And neither did my son."

Quinn
stopped and
turned to see husband and son with the same wary and baffled expression on their faces. As for the object of their stares, Teresa Bennett looked as convinced as they looked confused.

"Please don't tell me that you're the one who killed Alison and then strung her up beside the quarry," Quinn said wearily, unwilling to suffer through some heroic attempt by her to shield either of the men standing beside her. He'd seen enough Bennett-style loyalty to last him a lifetime.

Owen Bennett took a step closer to his wife. "Teresa, don't say another—"

"I did not kill Alison, Owen," she told him with remarkable dignity.

Owen looked relieved, but Quinn did a double take. It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who a minute ago had been an emotional wreck. "But you know who did?" he asked her, almost politely.

"No one killed Alison."