Necessary Evil (9 page)

He was studying me, those fathomless eyes
wide with inquiry and something else that I couldn’t decipher.

I opened my mouth, but what could I say?
That he’d hit the target almost dead center? Admitting that would lead to other
confessions, open lines of inquiry that I couldn’t allow. Other people would be
damaged – and, anyway, I wasn’t about to expose myself, my farm, or my aunt to
his control. Not if I could help it.

“What do you intend to do with this –
theory of yours?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think to say that
wasn’t an outright confession.

Professor Randall looked at his letter.
“As a historian, I ought to expose this fraud. We have an obligation to the
truth, you know.”

My heart skipped a beat, but he continued.
“But I don’t see the need to do that just yet. After all, this deception could
work to my benefit for a short time.”

“To
your
benefit?” I laughed
bitterly, thinking, again, of our nearly-empty bank account.

Again, he looked wounded. “No one needs to
be ruined by this, Miss Warwick. I told you that before. What I have in mind is
more of a collaboration.”

As I stared, he explained, “As I said, I’m
doing research on local activities during the Civil War. Finding the Chase
treasure would be a fitting end to my inquiries. My classes get out at the end
of June. What I propose is that I spend the summer here, maybe with a graduate
student or two, looking for the treasure. If we find nothing, no harm, no foul.
If we do find it, I get first rights to publication and Hadley University gets
first option on purchasing.”

I was regaining the power of speech. I
couldn’t believe that he expected me to fall for this. He’d gladly cover my
deception for what? A chance to live on the farm, to look for the treasure with
no more hope of its discovery than anyone else?

“You must take me for a fool,” I said carefully,
and he jumped right in to contradict.

“No. Despite evidence to the contrary, I
think you are probably an intelligent young woman who knows when she sees a
bargain.”

“By which you mean, free room and board
for a summer is a cheap price compared to what you could ask for.”

Randall sighed. “Miss Warwick...”

This time, though, I didn’t allow him to
finish. Instead, I went to the door and stood by it.

“Goodnight, Professor,” I said.

He looked at me curiously.

“I don’t like blackmail,” I added. “No matter
what the bargain. You will get out of my house and you will not return. And you
will do it now.”

He hesitated. Then he nodded, collected
his things, and shut his briefcase. He held up the copy of Uncle Michael’s
book.

“Might I borrow this?” he asked. “I’ll be
in town for a few more days. I’ll return it before I leave.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Just keep it.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

He slipped it into his wide jacket pocket,
looked around the room, and then came to the doorway.

I looked up at him. He had put his glasses
back on and the lens seemed to shield my eyes from his penetrating gaze. He was
close enough that I, again, caught the scent of his cologne, and I glared at
him. He smiled indulgently down at me, completely unaffected.

He had been right on too many marks. The
letter, its affects, our struggle on the farm. This deception of mine had been
my most bold, desperate risk, and its results only just managed to justify it.
I had to remind myself, as I stood in the doorway, trying to hold on to my
courage, that for all the troubles we were experiencing, the letter
had
made
a difference. We weren’t as bothered, and I hadn’t seen a hole for a week and a
half.

He’s wrong,
I thought.
It
has worked. It just took longer for the full effect to take place.
It
was worth the risk. It was worth the deceit.

If only my stomach, the physical symptom
of conscience, wouldn’t churn so much. If only I didn’t feel so exposed, so
raw, so
helpless
.

He will not
ruin me.

As if he could read my mind, his smile
broadened.

“It was nice meeting you,” Randall said,
and extended his hand. “No doubt we’ll meet again soon.”

I ignored the hand, and pinned him with a
resentful gaze. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?”

 “I do,” he said, and reached into
his pocket. “And so do you. When you change your mind about my offer, let me
know. I’ll be in town for a few days, conducting… Research.”

He handed me his business card. Had I been
able, I would have made him eat it. Professor Gregory Randall might know what
he was talking about with the letter, but he’d never had to contend with the
likes of Madeleine Warwick before. I could give as
good
as I got. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could do, but I wasn’t about to
allow him to trample over everything I was working for.

I drew a deep breath. “Professor Randall,
you’d better…”

But I never had a chance to finish.

“Maddie!”

The sound was more like a shriek and both
the professor and I jumped. A door slammed and someone hurtled down the hall,
gasping for breath, boots slamming against the hardwood floor. Ellen Gurney,
one of my senior students, threw herself into the room, her tiny figure
animated with panic. Her white face and wide eyes took in the professor and
myself, standing in the doorway. She stopped, gesturing madly, her mouth
working without making any sound.

“Ellen, what is it?” I demanded. Students
weren’t supposed to come into the house with their boots on, let alone without
an invitation. And what was Ellen doing here so late? No one was supposed to be
here but myself and…

“It’s Lindsay,” Ellen rasped out. She
looked ready to cry. “Oh God, you’d better come. There’s been an accident –
she’s on the back trail. It’s bad, Maddie. Really bad.”

Despite all my training, it took forever to
run to the scene of the accident. In the panic of the moment, none of us
thought to take Ellen’s horse, which remained saddled and tied near the house.
We ran three abreast into the silent night. Randall stayed beside me, although
he could have outpaced me handily, had he known which way to go.

Ellen ran next to me, wheezing. She was in
her fifties, strong and hearty, but not a runner, and the exertion really told
on her.

“Missy,” she gasped out, referring to
Lindsay’s favorite mount. “She’s… hurt… too.”

We turned a corner and Randall shot out in
front of us. Missy was on the side of the road, whinnying and wild-eyed and
pawing at the ground. Lindsay was a pile on the path, her left arm flung out
and bent at a sickening angle. A few feet away from her, a freshly dug,
carelessly refilled hole sat tucked in the darkened bend of the pathway.
Missy’s stumbling marks were clearly evident in the soft dirt.

My knees weakened and I nearly fell. Missy
whinnied and I called out, “Ellen, Missy.”

She went immediately to take Missy’s
dangling reins and tried to soothe the mare in a voice that trembled almost as
much as my hands when I reached out to touch Lindsay’s prone form. Her face was
white, luminescent in the darkness, and blood marred her paleness.

It was like being in a nightmare. For a
moment, my vision blurred, and I saw Uncle Michael in her stead.

I don’t know how long I would have stared,
motionless, had I not noticed the slight movement of her twisted torso. Reality
tore through my cloud of memories. Unlike Uncle Michael, Lindsay was breathing.

I tore off my jacket and threw it over
her, the sudden movement drawing Randall’s attention. He had one hand on her
pulse, the other patting his pockets.

He looked at me sharply. “You have a
phone?”

I already had it in my hand and was
dialing with shaky fingers. Ellen came to hover over us, her face white.

“Is she…?” she asked and I nodded.

“She’s still here.” I looked up at her and
saw Missy tossing her head and dancing in the middle of the trail, clearly
terrified and unsteady. Even in the dim light I could tell that she was
favoring her front left leg. Another small miracle – Uncle Michael’s mount had
suffered a clean break that very nearly sealed his fate.

“Get Missy back to the paddock and call
the vet,” I ordered. “Walk her slow and watch that leg.”

My voice was gruff, abrupt, but Ellen was
too grateful to have something to do to notice. She disappeared while I talked
to the operator and relayed their instructions to Randall, who did them without
question. When the paramedics appeared, backing the ambulance down the narrow
trail, I called Lindsay’s parents and left a message, promising to meet them at
the hospital.

Lindsay was stirring as they examined her,
but the paramedics wouldn’t let me hover and told me to stand several feet
away. I answered their questions as best I could, indicating the hole that I
thought was the culprit. Randall was crouched over it, examining the gouge with
the aid of his cell-phone light.

The paramedic was appalled. “That’s a hazard,”
he said, and he looked at me in horror. “This should have been
clearly
marked
off.”

“I know,” was all I could say.

I must have looked properly penitent,
because his “I’ll have to report this,” was almost apologetic.

I nodded and when he was finished with me,
I wandered off to stand by Randall. I thought I ought to thank him for coming,
for helping, but the gratitude was lost in a tangle of guilt, anger, and fear.
I stood there, numbly watching his light play over the freshly disturbed dirt.

When he looked up at me, I thought,
He’s
going to say it. He’s going to remind me that this is my fault. And it is.

But when he spoke, Randall said, “There’s
something wrong about all of this, Warwick. There’s something very wrong about
this.”

The paramedics called me away – they were
leaving. Did I want to ride along? I did, and sat in the back of the cab,
watching as a paramedic - a competent looking woman with a professional’s
detachment - examined my assistant. I thought she was too calm, too
dispassionate, and I remember thinking how fragile and
young
Lindsay
looked, swathed in temporary bandages, her tee-shirt torn to reveal extensive
bruising.

When we arrived at the hospital, doctors
whisked Lindsay down the hall and I was left to address her parents in the
waiting room. They arrived twenty minutes after I did, frantic and full of
accusations.

I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t entirely
up front at first. I explained that Lindsay’s horse had tripped on the path and
thrown Lindsay, and I thought that her arm was broken. I didn’t mention the
hole – there are plenty of reasons why a horse would stumble.

But Lindsay’s father wasn’t a horseman,
and he had the layman’s idea that a horse was like a machine and should work at
a certain speed with a certain amount of reliability. Accidents were caused by
mechanical failures, something that was both measurable and remedial.

When he asked, “What caused the trip?” I
had no choice but to confess.

“Someone has been digging on the trail,” I
said. “They left an unmarked soft spot. The horse stumbled on that.”

They stared at me.

“One of
your
people?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. I don’t know who did
it.”

He looked at his wife, whose welling eyes
were spilling over.

“How could this happen again?” she asked, as
though pleading with me. “I thought that was all over, I thought that ended
with Michael.”

The lump in my throat made it difficult to
answer the question. “I thought so too.”

“And what is Chase Farms going to do about
this?” Lindsay’s father demanded.

Lindsay’s doctor entered in time to save
me from answering the question. Lindsay was unconscious, and had suffered a
concussion and a broken arm. They reset the arm bone and expected her to
recover full use of it. The medical staff wanted her to stay overnight for
observation, and afterwards, she would be on bed rest for at least a week.

“What about her competitions?”

I’m pleased to say I wasn’t the one who
asked the question. Lindsay’s father was her biggest fan and had helped Lindsay
to keep in the riding circuit, even when the family’s financial situation
looked shaky. Lindsay had been hoping to qualify for a riding scholarship at
the regionals, which were only a few months away.

“She won’t be riding for a while,” the
doctor said. “I know you’re supposed to get right back up on the horse, but her
head injury puts her at serious risk. If she were my daughter, I wouldn’t put
her on a horse until at least the fall.” He winced and amended, “The autumn.”

Lindsay’s father sank back into the
plastic-padded waiting room chair while his wife, who had said little in the
exchange, turned to me with enormous eyes.

“How could this happen?” she asked in a
haunted whisper. “How could this happen again?”

She might as well have been reading my
mind.