Sweet Justice (20 page)

Now Mallory was crying again, guilt and pain in equal measures. He'd wanted her to feel as though it was okay to show emotion, but this scared him, the indomitable Mallory Blair at a loss. No plan A or B or C.

Later, he'd tell himself that was why he'd kissed her. Because he was scared. Because he didn't know what else to do.

Maybe. In the moment, it certainly did the trick. The second his lips touched hers, her tears stopped, with only a soft “Oh!” escaping her.

Mallory leaned in, kissing him back, gripping his arms as if she were hurtling over a waterfall. He could totally get that sensation, because as his mouth tasted hers all salty from her tears, he wanted to throw caution to the wind.

Forget his previous vows to keep his distance from beautiful women.

Forget his assurances to Daniel and Dutch that he would keep this particular beautiful woman at arm's length.

Forget that she was weeping, in part, because he had left her sister too long.

The way she felt, the way she clung to him, he could forget it all.

Mallory pulled back. Stared down at the wedding dress in her lap. “I need—”

She didn't have to say another word. He picked up the fabric and waited for her to begin ripping out the seam again.

The kiss must have loosened her tongue, because she began, in stops and starts, to talk. “I have to take care of her, Andrew. I have to make sure she's okay.”

“I know that. I get it. These stitches are in the wrong place, right?”

Mallory frowned. “Yeah. That's why I'm pulling them out.”

“What would happen if you yanked hard and forced them to give way?”

He heard her chuckle and the rhythmic plunk-plunk-plunk of the seam ripper started up again. “I thought you said you'd helped Ma do this before,” she commented.

“I have. What I mean is... Katelyn doesn't have to do it all on some elaborate timetable. Maybe college is what she needs, but not right now. Pushing her to do something she's not ready to do—wouldn't it be like yanking out this seam?”

The last of the stitches gave way. Mallory laid aside the seam ripper and smoothed over the pin-size holes left by the threads. “Probably—no, you're right. I know you're right.” She held up a hand to forestall his protest. “I don't have that luxury, Andrew. I can't let her take all the time in the world to pick herself up. She has to finish these courses or start all over again with her senior year. It's something she wouldn't have to do if...” Mallory trailed off. “We were fine. Before the accident, we were
fine
.”

She didn't have to connect the dots for him. If he hadn't left Katelyn on that upstairs landing, Mallory wouldn't be faced with such an impossible choice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A
WEEK
LATER
, Mallory parked her car in a visitor's slot at the college. Consulting a campus map she'd printed at the library, she set off in the direction of the quad.

Today she hoped to conquer two missions—the first to run one of Katelyn's old roommates to ground, and the other to talk to her advisor in person.

The roommate, who was more than a little vague on where she'd been during the fire, could still, hopefully, solve the mystery of when the power actually got cut off. The utility company had been as creative in saying no to Mallory as the insurance company had.

Katelyn was no help, either. Even this morning, she'd refused to talk about the fire at all, despite Mallory's pleas that if they didn't get something concrete to help bolster the lawsuit, it was probably dead in the water.

“Maybe I don't want to sue. We shouldn't sue anybody, Mal,” she'd told her at breakfast. “Don't you keep calling it an accident? Well, you can't blame anybody for an accident. It happened, okay? It's over. Can't we forget about it?”

After that, she'd barricaded herself in her room. Mallory had despaired of getting any current contact information out of Katelyn. If she hadn't remembered the scrap of paper with the phone number in hot pink, she would have never gotten this far.

That phone call had led to another, and that one had led her to Destiny, one of Katelyn's roommates. The girl had grudgingly agreed to meet her “at the quad” between classes. Mallory was determined to be there early, so as not to give Destiny any excuse to ditch her.

While she waited, she gazed out at the campus, its columned brick buildings situated around a rectangle of green grass. Her college experience—the single, glorious semester she'd had—had been at Savannah College of Art and Design. The buildings had tended toward the modern style, spread all over the city of Savannah.

Still, some things seemed universal. Her residence hall had featured a courtyard much like this one, with palm trees instead of the giant live oaks here. The images came flooding back to her... Girls wearing shorts and skimpy tops lay stretched out on blankets, soaking up the springtime sun, books opened but abandoned nearby. Guys, some shirtless, some in rumpled T-shirts, sent Frisbees skimming perilously close to the girls, obviously in hopes that it would attract their attention. Fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes fluttered in the breeze like corporate flags.

No one hurried. They slouched along the curving concrete pathways, lounged on benches, strolled across the grass. None of them seemed in the least concerned about anything beyond this moment.

They have no idea what the real world is like
, Mallory thought. The raw bitterness that sprang up within her shocked her. She didn't regret the choice she'd made to drop out of college and raise Katelyn, of course not.

If she could have had the chance to soak up this life for a little longer...

“Hey, you Mallory what's-her-name?”

The voice beside her startled her. She turned to find that it was indeed a college student. Dressed in black-and-white chevron printed shorts and a lace crop top that came just south of her rib cage—the better to show off a belly-button ring—the girl puffed on a cigarette as she teetered on canvas wedges.

“Yes, I'm Mallory Blair.” She extended her hand. “You must be Destiny.”

Destiny took her hand in one of the limpest handshakes she'd ever received, along with a look up and down of intense scrutiny. “Figured it was you. You dress cute, but all businesswomanish.”

Mallory couldn't help glancing down at the yard-sale blazer and the flowered skirt she'd fashioned out of thrift-store curtains. “Thanks. I think.”

Destiny plopped down on the rough concrete retaining wall. She sighed with pleasure and took another drag off her cigarette. “These shoes are killer cute, but they're a pain to wear.” She squinted through the smoke ring she'd blown. “You don't mind, do you? Me smoking? The buildings are smoke-free, so I gotta take advantage of the break.”

Faced with the choice of possibly running Destiny off or enduring smoke, Mallory shook her head. “I just had a couple of questions. About the fire.”

“I lost everything—like sixty pairs of shoes! Bum firemen couldn't be bothered to even pick up a single piece of my clothes,” Destiny whined. “And Daddy said he wasn't going to let me have another credit card, even though I had like this much—” she held up a thumb and forefinger in a tight pincer “—left before I'd maxed it out.”

Mallory swallowed hard to hold back another wave of resentment. She had to put herself in this girl's place. She had
been
in this girl's place a few short years ago, until that life-changing phone call had come. Back then, could she have said anything remotely empathetic in response to a devastating fire?

She cleared her throat. “About the fire. Katelyn is—”

“How's she doing? I guess I should have gone by and seen her, but I've been so busy.” Destiny shook her head, which only resulted in one of her long, dangly earrings getting caught in her hair.

“Katelyn's doing well.” Her words sounded about a hundred years old even to her ears. This girl made her feel so ancient. “She's still in therapy, but she's walking some, and she's been taking classes online.”

“Cool beans,” Destiny said. She flicked a trail of ash onto the walkway. “Tell her I said hi. She's a cute kid. When I moved in, I figured she was gonna be kind of a drag, since she was still in high school and all, but she was pretty okay.”

“You moved in after the semester got started?” Mallory asked.

“I had a place, you know, with some friends, but this one girl, she was making moves on my boyfriend. I couldn't stay there, could I?” Destiny finished off the cigarette and sighed. “You don't happen to have a smoke, do you?”

“No, I don't. Sorry.” She wasn't sorry. She was grateful to her stiletto heels. “I'm trying to make sense of something in the fire department's report about the fire. Did they ever figure out what caused it?”

“Not hardly, but it wasn't my cigarettes.” She rolled her eyes, spotted someone she knew and waved them over. “You gotta have a smoke on you, please, please, please—”

The girl liberated a long slender cigarette and a lighter from her tiny purse. With another sigh of relief, Destiny lit up and drew in a calming breath. “Oh, my God, thank you! I'll do you a solid, just wait!”

The girl strolled on, her own cigarette dangling from her fingertips.

Mallory had marshaled her thoughts to ask the next question. “Anyway, what has me puzzled is that the report says that the power was off when the fire department arrived. Was it? And if it was, how could the fire be electrical?”

Instantly a cagey wariness came over Destiny's face. “I don't... What do you mean?”

“The power. When did they cut the power off?”

“Uh... Well.” Inexplicably Destiny's hand shook so hard that her borrowed cigarette dropped to the ground. She swore. “Now I'll have to find another one. And I've only— What time is it?”

When Mallory consulted her wristwatch and told her the time, Destiny groaned. “I've only got ten minutes to get to my next class, and it's all the way across campus. I can't cut, either, because I've cut too many times. Are we done?”

“No. You didn't answer my question. When did the power get cut off?”

“How should I know? The place was on fire. I didn't stop to check. Listen, I gotta go—”

“Would anybody else know?”

Destiny squirmed impatiently. “If I don't find someone to bum a smoke, I'm gonna be late for class—”

To short-circuit the whine and gain cooperation, Mallory dug out her wallet and pulled a much-treasured five-dollar bill from it. “Will that buy a pack?”

Destiny snatched at the five. “It will with the two bucks in quarters I've already got. Thanks awfully!”

Exactly as she had when Katelyn was ten, Mallory held the five out of reach. “Not so fast. Was anybody else there that could tell me when the power was cut off?”

Any vestige of cheerfulness left Destiny. “That's a craptastic way of doing things. What am I, twelve?”

“Either you want this or not. A name—and a number that actually works.”

“Oh, all right. My ex-boyfriend was there. He crashed on the couch for a few days. His name is Gabe Terrell.” She rattled off the number.

Mallory made Destiny wait while she keyed the number into her phone, then handed her the money.

Destiny was already picking her way backward down the walkway as fast as her wedges would take her. “I don't guarantee that he'll actually answer.”

Mallory shook her head to clear the foul smell of cigarette smoke. She hoped it would be off her clothes before she met with Katelyn's academic advisor.

The advisor, a harried-looking woman with piles of paper on her desk, smiled when Mallory introduced herself.

“I'm glad to meet you. I wish it were under happier circumstances,” the woman said.

Mallory frowned. “Katelyn's doing much better now—”

“No, about Katelyn's withdrawal from school. Maybe it's for the best.”

A loud buzzing filled Mallory's ears. She leaned against the back of the chair for support. “Did Katelyn miss the deadline for signing up for summer classes?”

The advisor gave her a sharp look over her half-rimmed glasses. “Dear, why don't you sit down?”

Safely on the chair, Mallory asked again for the woman to explain what she meant.

The advisor folded her glasses and set them aside. She clasped her hands on the desk. “Katelyn told me that she wouldn't be able to finish her coursework—and her professors concurred. She said she planned to drop out, get her GED and go to cosmetology school instead.”

The buzzing increased. “When—”

“Oh, gracious, midterms, I guess. She hasn't done any work at all since then. Maybe we were a bit too ambitious?”

“But she was working—”

The woman reached over and patted Mallory's hand. “It's probably for the best. After all, she struggled that first semester. Give her a year off, maybe repeat her senior year of high school. She would benefit from the maturation.”

“She struggled? This is the first I've heard—”

“Didn't you get the progress reports from her high school? I'm sure I have signed copies.” She clacked a few keys on her computer and nodded. “Yes, here they are.” A printer whirred. “Reach behind you, dear, so you'll have a copy to refresh your memory. Now, you see? She barely squeaked by with a C for her first two classes, and that's with us not counting the final because of her...well, the accident. And her current grades this semester are abysmal. The poor child had too much going on.”

All Mallory could do was stare at the signature. Her name—but not her handwriting. Katelyn's. Katelyn had forged her name.

“—and she told me she'd discussed this with you, and with—oh, what was the name? Andrew? Yes, Andrew. He's... What? A cousin? An uncle? This Andrew had pointed out that maybe college wasn't for her, and that was a tremendous relief. Many adults won't be honest with kids—”

Honest? Mallory was going to be that from now on, without a doubt.